Having modeled the first 400 million years of the Universe life on a supercomputer, the researchers were surprised to find a previously unknown process that leads to the appearance of massive black holes. It turned out that they can grow in dense dark regions with suppressed star formation, and this is a real revolution in the modern view of these objects.
In our study, we found a completely new mechanism that leads to the formation of massive black holes in the halos of dark matter. In fact, for this very dense gas clouds, you just need to be in a region with intensive convergence of matter,.
-John Wise, lead author of a study from the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
The light emanating from the environment of the first massive black holes in the Universe is so intense that it can reach our telescopes, overcoming vast distances in excess of 13 billion light years. However, the study of these gravitational monsters has not yet given an answer to the question of how they were formed. One of the ancestors of the most ancient black holes can be stars, which are about ten thousand times more powerful than the Sun, but their nature and existence are still being discussed.
This study offers a new and very promising way to solve this riddle. Having modeled the young Universe, at around 270 million years after the Big Bang, the team noticed ten massive regions in which the stars were to be born, but there were only dense clouds of gas in them.
The key signatures of the areas in which massive black holes were born in the young universe are fast-growing clouds of gas — the forerunners of all modern galaxies. When some of these regions in dark matter haloes that serve as gravitational glue for all cosmic structures quickly gain mass, normal star formation is suppressed, and ideal conditions are created for the growth of black holes, since they have no competitors for the matter falling into halos.
-John Wise
Previously it was believed that only the intense ultraviolet radiation of a nearby galaxy could suppress the formation of stars in the region that forms the black hole. But, although it still matters in the new work, its role is no longer the main one.
We saw massive black holes being born in isolated, overly dense regions of the Universe. Dark matter creates most of the gravity in them, and the gas under its influence can form either stars or a massive black hole,.
-John Wise
The next step, scientists call modeling the growth of galaxies around these massive black holes, which will help to understand their evolution, as well as to outline the regions of search and methods of detection.
A new process of massive black hole formation in the young universe
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