Huge Black Hole Existed Before Universe's First Star (Weekend Feature)

The discovery of black holes was the first collision of quantum gravity with general relativity. In 2019, astrophysicists at the University of Western Ontario discovered proof for the direct formation of black holes that need not arise from stellar remnants. The production of black holes in the early universe, which formed from massive seeds aided by the gravitational field immediately after the Big Bang, provided scientists with an explanation for what appeared to be extremely massive black hole anomalies at a very early stage in the history of our universe.

Supermassive black holes formed very, very quickly in the early universe over a very, very short period of time and then suddenly, they stopped.

Shantanu Basu and Arpan Das from the Western Department of Physics & Astronomy developed an explanation for the observed distribution of mass and luminosity of supermassive black holes, for which there was no scientific explanation before. They concluded that supermassive black holes formed very, very quickly in the early universe over a very, very short period of time and then suddenly, they stopped.

No Need Supernova

In a study published June 28, 2019 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers ran computer models to show that certain supermassive black holes in the early universe could have formed simply by gathering large amounts of gas into one gravitationally bound cloud. The researchers found that, within a few hundred million years, a sufficiently large cloud could collapse under its own mass and create a tiny black hole — no supernova needed.

Live Collapse Scenario

This explanation contrasts with current understanding of how stellar-mass black holes form, namely that they emerge when the center of a very massive star collapses on its own.

Maybe they started out extraordinarily massive, going through some physical process that we don’t fully understand.”

“This is indirect observational evidence that black holes originate from direct collapse and not from stellar remnants,” said Basu, a professor of astronomy at Western who is internationally recognized as an expert in the early stages of star formation and the evolution of the protoplanetary disk.

“Our model for the quasar luminosity function provides indirect observational evidence that black holes originate from direct collapse and not from stellar remnants,” Shantanu Basu wrote in an email to Daily Galaxy. “This implies that there was a brief period of rapid growth in the number of these objects and their mass in the time between two and four hundred million years after the Big Bang. New instruments such as the Nancy Roman Telescope are expected to significantly increase the observed quasar sample at a redshift of z ~ 6 – 7, providing significantly improved statistics of the quasar’s luminosity function and allowing us to limit our model.”

Basu and Das developed a new mathematical model by calculating the mass function of supermassive black holes that form over a finite period of time and undergo rapid exponential mass growth. Mass growth can be governed by the Eddington limit which is determined by the balance of the forces of radiation and gravity or can even exceed it by a simple factor.

“Supermassive black holes only have a short period of time where they can grow rapidly and then at a certain point, because of all the radiation in the universe created by black holes and other stars, their production stops,” Basu explained. “That is the immediate collapse scenario.”

Over the past decade, many supermassive black holes that are a billion times larger than the Sun have been discovered at high ‘redshift’, meaning they were in place in our universe 800 million years after the Big Bang. The presence of these young and extremely massive black holes calls into question our understanding of the formation and growth of black holes.

“The very formation massive early seed could be enhanced by the presence of a magnetic field, which can dissipate the angular momentum of the collapsing gas cloud, allowing a large amount of mass to gather into a central object,” said Basu. Daily Galaxy.

The direct collapse scenario allows for a much larger initial mass than the standard stellar remnant scenario implies, and could explain the observations. These new results provide evidence that black holes collapse directly as they were indeed produced in the early universe.

Last word-Shantanu Basu in an email to The Daily Galaxy

“There is growing evidence that supermassive black holes with masses of more than a billion solar masses that were observed to exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang required an enormous initial seed mass of about 100,000 solar masses, much larger than would have been possible since the end of the year. . pop star life III.

An immediate black hole collapse scenario could explain the enormous seed mass if the early universe contained an atomic cooling halo (AC) in which there were no hydrogen or metal molecules.

“Gas in such a halo can contract gravitationally while maintaining a high temperature of nearly 10,000 K. In this case the rate of mass accretion to the center is very high and consequently a black hole with a mass of about 100,000 solar masses can form after a brief supermassive stellar phase. . This seed black hole will continue to grow from its host’s halo.

“Black holes produce ultraviolet radiation that can split hydrogen molecules in nearby halos and turn them into AC halos. This causes a chain reaction effect: the formation of an AC halo and an embedded DCBH leads to the formation of another DCBH in the nearest halo. The scene is set for a rapid exponential growth of the number of DCBHs. But the era of DCBH formation could not last long because the developing radiation field would eventually vaporize gas from the gravity wells of most of the halos, disabling the halos from DCBH formation. So the DCBH formation is a short-lived boom-bust phenomenon.

Will Halo Collapse into the Galactic Center?

“Another outstanding question is whether the AC halos will actually collapse to the center rather than splitting up into many smaller objects. Fragmentation can easily occur if the material falls onto a rotating supported disk rather than into the center.

“Our recent work shows that even the very weak seed magnetic field in the AC halo can transport the angular momentum sufficiently far from the central collapse zone and allow the mass to move efficiently toward the center without settling into the circumstellar disk.”

(Note: The second paragraph of Last Words is based on the results in the paper Hirano, Machida, & Basu, 2021, ApJ, 917, 34.)

Maxwell Moeastrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona, via Shantanu Basu and University of Western Ontario

Image at top of page: shows the interior 30 light-years away from a dark matter halo in a cluster of young galaxies. The rotating disk of gas breaks into three clumps that collapse under its own gravity to form a supermassive star. Credit: John Wise, Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week investigating the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

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