2024-02-07 09:45:12
A recent study has led to astonishing conclusions about supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of many galaxies.
From some star corpses, black holes can form, with masses not very different from those of those old stars.
At the center of many galaxies there are, however, black holes with much greater masses, which can be up to billions of times that of the Sun.
For a long time it has been believed that these supermassive black holes were also formed from the corpses of stars in galaxies, and that they increased their mass by absorbing matter from their surroundings.
However, the new research, based on an analysis of observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), reveals a very different scenario.
According to the latest findings, black holes not only existed in the infancy of the universe, but also promoted the formation of new stars and galaxies.
Illustration of a magnetic field generated by a supermassive black hole in the early universe, showing turbulent plasma flows that help turn nearby gas clouds into stars. (Image: Roberto Molar Candanosa / Johns Hopkins University)
“We know that these monstrous black holes exist in the center of galaxies close to our Milky Way, but the big surprise now is that they were also present at the beginning of the universe and were almost like building blocks or seeds of the first galaxies,” emphasizes Joseph. Silk, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, United States and co-author of the study.
The discovery suggests that in the first 50 million years of the universe’s existence, there were already black holes with considerable masses and that such holes accelerated the formation of stars and galaxies at that time.
The study is titled “Which Came First: Supermassive Black Holes or Galaxies? Insights from JWST.” And it has been published in the academic journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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