2024-05-08 23:47:21
Scientists have observed several quasars that power supermassive black holes in the early Universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers also studied the light of the surrounding ancient stars.
The Space portal reports this.
The results helped solve a long-standing mystery: which came first – a supermassive black hole or a galaxy? Black holes are still one of the most mysterious mysteries of the cosmos that astronomers are working on.
One of the questions of greatest interest is the origin of supermassive black holes, which are located at the centers of galaxies and, already in the early era of the Universe, actively absorbed matter and gained mass in less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
The mechanism that would explain the emergence of supermassive black holes in the early epoch of the Universe appears to be complex. According to a common hypothesis, they could be formed by the mergers of many less massive black holes and the active absorption of surrounding gas and matter.
However, the time required for such processes may exceed the age of the Universe itself. The “heavy seed” theory is one interesting explanation for the origin of supermassive black holes in the early Universe. According to this theory, the gravitational collapse of a dense cloud of gas and dust could lead to the formation of a black hole of significant mass already in the early stages of cosmic development.
This “embryo” of a black hole, with a mass of many millions of solar masses, could then attract more matter to itself, increasing its mass and size. When supermassive black holes actively consume surrounding gas and dust, they form accretion disks around themselves.
These disks are made of heated material that emits intense radiation, including visible light, X-rays and gamma rays. When the radiation from the accretion disk becomes very bright, the object is called a quasar. According to the new theory, primordial black holes existed long before the formation of early galaxies.
They probably initially formed from large clouds of gas and dust in the early Universe, and then, by absorbing surrounding material, they gained weight and became supermassive. These black holes then became the “seed” for the formation of galaxies, attracting matter and creating gravitational vortices around them, which then led to the formation of stars and galactic structures.
Earlier, Cursor wrote that scientists discovered that a huge black hole arose after the explosion of a star just 2 thousand light years from Earth. This cosmic colossus is the most massive black hole in our Galaxy, located in the constellation Aquila.
2024-05-08 23:47:21