(ORDO NEWS) — Supermassive black holes are among the largest objects in the universe. Their evolution, which is millions and billions of times greater than the mass of the Sun, is difficult to explain.
And the higher mass range for these objects, especially early in the history of the universe, is even more difficult.
These supermassive black holes have a mass of more than 10 billion suns, and this is not just a theoretical assumption.
A galaxy called J2157, discovered about 12.3 billion years ago, contained a black hole with a mass of 34 billion solar masses, and the galaxy S5 0014+81 about 12.1 billion years ago had a choke with a mass of 40 billion solar masses.
If they were black holes just sitting and growing, feeding on the material around them, and there’s no chance that when the universe was less than 10 percent of its current age, they would have had enough time to get that big.
Obviously. however, their existence is not impossible. They are there, after all. And a new simulation using a powerful early universe supercomputer has given us the means by which these beasts can exist without violating our current cosmological models.
“We found that one of the possible channels for the formation of ultra-massive black holes resulted from an extreme merger of massive galaxies, which is most likely to occur during the era of “cosmic noon,” explains astrophysicist Ewing Nee of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Slow growth through accretion is just one way to increase the mass of black holes. Another path that we have indeed observed in recent years is the collision of two black holes.
This is sort of a shortcut to gaining a lot of mass, resulting in a black hole that barely reaches the combined mass of objects before the merger, as a small percentage of the mass escapes as gravitational energy during the merger. p>
To determine how supermassive black holes might form in the early universe, Nee and her colleagues used custom software called Astrid, designed to study the evolution of the universe, including galaxy formation and supermassive black hole mergers.
They run Astrid on a supercomputer called Frontera at the Texas Center for Advanced Computing.
A supercomputer is needed because you need a lot of space to observe extreme outliers like supermassive black holes, which in turn requires a lot of computing power.
But it paid off: about 10 billion years ago, researchers observed the formation of black holes with a mass of about 10 billion solar masses.
“We have discovered three supermassive black holes that accumulated their mass during cosmic noon, that is, 11 billion years ago, when active star formation began.
Galactic nuclei (AGNs) and supermassive black holes in general are reaching their peak activity,” says Ni.
“During this epoch, we noticed an extreme and relatively fast merger of three massive galaxies. Each of the masses of the galaxies is 10 times the mass of our Milky Way, and a supermassive black hole is at the center of each galaxy.
Our results show the possibility that these triplet quasar systems are the progenitors of these rare supermassive black holes after these triplets gravitationally interact and merge with each other.”
We know that galaxies sometimes collide and merge with each other – the Milky Way itself is something of a Frankenstein monster of smaller galaxies – and that these mergers can be tripartite debacles.
Astrid’s simulations show that this can also happen in the early universe with high-mass quasars.
This is a class of galaxies with a hyperactive supermassive black hole at the center, actively gobbling up so much material. that they emit light for billions of light years, the brightest objects in the universe.
When these galaxies merge, so do their supermassive black holes descend towards the center of the newly merged massive galaxy to perform an orbital dance that will eventually lead to the merging of massive black holes.
We don’t know how fast these collisions happen the frequency of the gravitational waves they emit is far too low for our current detection range but estimates show it happens quite often.
New Advances in Technology However, this could mean that we are much closer to finding observable evidence of these mergers.
NASA‘s Future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be able to detect a much wider range of gravitational waves; and the powerful James Webb Space Telescope is even now peering into the distant universe to reveal its secrets.
The team’s findings and Astrid’s simulations will help scientists better interpret the JWST observations and figure out how cosmic noon shaped the universe we see around us today.
“This is an exciting time for astrophysicists,” Ni says.
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