Scientists have uncovered the mystery super-fast growth of black holes in the young Universe
MOSCOW, may 24 — RIA Novosti. Astronomers have discovered a clutch of unusual galaxies in the early Universe that grew hundreds of times faster than their modern cousins, which explains the mystery of the existence of giant black holes in the first era after the Big Bang, according to an article published in the journal Nature.
“We were looking for a completely different thing — we tried to find traces of star formation in those galaxies where you found these black holes. Instead, we managed to find four other objects around them, stars were formed with a “crazy” speed — several hundred solar masses per year,” says Roberto Decarli (Roberto Decarli) from the Institute of astronomy in Heidelberg (Germany).
It is believed that in the center of the most massive galaxies live supermassive black holes, whose mass can range from a million to a billion solar masses. The reasons for the formation of these objects is still not entirely clear. Initially, scientists believed that such objects occurred in the same way as their normal “cousins” — as a result of gravitational collapse of stars and the subsequent mergers of several large black holes.
Observing the first galaxies of the Universe have forced astrophysicists to doubt it — it turned out that they contained black holes with a mass of tens of billions of Suns. These objects, as shown by the calculations just did not have time to grow to such dimensions, if they were born small. So some scientists began to believe that.
supermassive black holes are born in more exotic scenarios as a result of the collapse of a giant cloud of pure atomic hydrogen or by clumps of dark matter.
This is how the artist imagined the birth of a black hole in the early Universe.
Decarli, and his colleagues found a possible answer to this question by studying the most distant galaxies, where they found these black holes, with the help of the ALMA radio telescope, built on a high-Chilean of the chajnantor plateau. This telescope, as explained by the authors of the article can follow the movements of even the most cold clouds of gases from which stars are formed, allowing it to be used for “direct” estimates of the frequency of star formation.
The galaxy, who tried to study Decarli and his colleagues have formed approximately 13 million years ago, just a few hundred million years after a Big Bang. A large distance to them and the bright light of quasars significantly complicate attempts to conduct a “census” of stars in them, and to estimate the mass of the “star materials”, focusing on carbon footprints in their spectrum.
For this reason, astronomers failed to see nascent stars in 25 galaxies, for which they were originally observed, but they were able to trace this process in the next “star cities,” black holes which have not been so active.
As it turned out, the stars within them are formed with unimaginable high speed every year gave birth to several stars, whose mass is several hundred times higher than that of the Sun. These rates of star formation and the associated influx of cold matter in the galaxy, according to calculations of the authors, should suffice in order to explain the formation of giant black holes weighing billions of Suns in the first billion years of the Universe.