(ORDO NEWS) — Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA) have developed a new theoretical model that explains the mystery of the appearance of supermassive black holes.
According to the results, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, hypothetical ultralight dark matter, which collapsed during a phase transition in the early universe, could play a key role in this process.
It is known that black holes with a mass of the order of a billion Suns had time to form already in the first billion years of the existence of the Universe.
This presents a problem for cosmological models, since no astrophysical process is currently known to explain such a rapid occurrence.
One popular hypothesis is that black holes gain mass by accreting matter, but there are limits to how quickly matter can be consumed, such as the Eddington limit. When it is exceeded, the absorption rate is so high that the released energy throws matter out of the accretion disk.
Another possible mechanism for the emergence of supermassive black holes can be the collision of galaxies, as a result of which the black holes located in their centers merge. However, in the early universe, the process of galaxy formation had only just begun.
As alternative hypotheses, physicists suggest the collapse of giant gas clouds into quasi-stellar objects, the collapse of dense star clusters, or even the death of supermassive stars with a mass of 100 thousand Suns.
In a new study, physicists have suggested that ultralight dark matter particles, which are 28 orders of magnitude lighter than a proton (10 to the minus 28th power of an electron volt), played a key role in the formation of black holes.
As it expanded, the initially hot universe gradually cooled, and at a temperature of about 110 million kelvins, a phase transition occurred when gravity, generated by ultralight dark matter, began to dominate pressure. As a result, clumps of dark matter collapsed to form primordial supermassive black holes.
As scientists write, the collapse of dark matter into supermassive black holes should generate relic low-frequency gravitational waves, which in the future can be recorded using the latest detectors. Existing gravitational wave detectors do not yet have the necessary sensitivity.
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