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Its space-based counterpart, Loeb anticipates, could provide a better “census” of the supermassive black hole population.įor Basu, the question of how supermassive black holes are created is “one of the big chinks in the armor” of our current understanding of the universe. “We have already started the era of gravitational wave astronomy with stellar-mass black holes,” he says, referring to the black hole mergers detected by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Set to launch in the 2030s, it will allow scientists to measure gravitational waves-fine ripples in the fabric of space-time-more accurately than ever before. In the next five or 10 years, Basu adds, as the “mountain of data” comes in, models like his and his colleague's will help astronomers interpret what they see.Īvi Loeb, one of the pioneers of direct-collapse black hole theory and the director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, is especially excited for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. But that may change in the next decade as powerful new tools come online, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna-all of which will hover in low Earth orbit-as well as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, based in Chile. The ability to see a supermassive black hole forming is still out of reach existing telescopes can’t look that far back yet. “All this requires is that some very massive black holes did form in the early universe, and they formed in a chain reaction process, and it only lasted a brief time.” “It’s not dependent on some person’s very specific scenario, specific chain of events happening in a certain way,” Basu says. “And so the whole process comes to an end.” He and Das estimate that the chain reaction lasted about 150 million years.įor Basu and Das, one strength of their model is that it doesn’t depend on how the giant seeds were created.
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“The overall radiation field in the universe becomes too strong to allow such large amounts of gas to collapse directly,” Basu says. As more and more black holes-and stars and galaxies-were born and started radiating energy and light, the gas clouds evaporated. This fits the conclusions of several other astronomers, who believe that the population of supermassive black holes increased at an exponential rate in the universe’s infancy.īut at some point, the chain reaction stopped. A hot gas cloud collapses more easily than a cold one with each big meal, the black hole would emit more energy, heating up other gas clouds, and so on. Each time one of the nascent black holes accreted matter, it would radiate energy, which would heat up neighboring gas clouds. They can’t say exactly where the seeds of the black holes came from in the first place, but they think they know what happened next. The distribution of their masses-how many are bigger, how many are smaller, and how many are in between-is the main indicator of how they formed.Īfter analyzing that information, Basu and Das proposed that the supermassive black holes might have arisen from a chain reaction.
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Quasars are supermassive black holes that continuously suck in, or accrete, large amounts of matter they get a special name because the stuff falling into them emits bright radiation, making them easier to observe than many other kinds of black holes. As they described late last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they did it by looking at quasars. Now a pair of researchers at Western University in Ontario, Canada-Shantanu Basu and Arpan Das-have found some of the first solid observational evidence for the theory. One long-standing explanation for this mystery, known as the direct-collapse theory, hypothesizes that ancient black holes somehow got big without the benefit of a supernova stage. In cosmic terms, that’s practically the blink of an eye-not nearly long enough for a star to be born, collapse into a black hole, and eat enough mass to become supermassive. These monsters exist at the center of almost all galaxies in the universe, and some emerged only 690 million years after the Big Bang. What this tidy origin story fails to explain is where supermassive black holes, which range from 100,000 to tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun, come from.
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Astronomers have a pretty good idea of how most black holes form: A massive star dies, and after it goes supernova, the remaining mass (if there’s enough of it) collapses under the force of its own gravity, leaving behind a black hole that’s between five and 50 times the mass of our Sun.