How is the largest 'monster' born in the universe?

Super-large black holes can be formed from giant gas clouds bound by gravity without any explosions.

About 13 billion years ago, when the universe was still just a mess, the supermassive black holes appeared.

Astronomers today are still able to see the remnants of these black holes when observing quasars - extremely large, brilliant celestial bodies believed to take billions of times more energy from black holes than the Sun. Earth.

The image illustrates a quasar with the energy source being a black hole in the center.(Photo: NASA).

Their existence poses a problem. Many quasars appear to be born from the first 800 million years of the universe, long before any star can grow large enough to collapse, explode in a stellar explosion and form a black hole.

So where do these giant black holes come from? According to a popular theory, probably from a lot of gas.

The way a "monster" came into being

In a study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have run computer models to show that some of the supermassive black holes in the early universe can be formed from giant gas clouds bound by gravity.

The researchers found that, in a few hundred million years, such a large enough cloud could collapse under its own mass, creating a small black hole without any explosion.

These theoretical objects are called direct collapse black holes (DCBH) . According to the black hole expert Chaianu Basu, the lead author of the study and astrophysicist at Western University, London, Ontario, one of the defining characteristics of an electric field is that they have to be formed very quickly over a very short period of time. Short of the early universe.

Quasars are extremely far and ultra-bright star-like objects, with a very large redshift characteristic.(Photo: Extremetech.

"Black holes are formed and developed over a period of only about 150 million years," Basu said. "At the same time, black holes can increase the volume 10,000 times."

How does a cloud of gas become a black hole? According to a 2017 study, such variation requires two different galaxies: A galaxy with many young stars and the other galaxy with only gas.

Cosmic primitive ruins

"When new stars form in young, multi-star galaxies, they emit a hot stream of radiation that constantly scans the nearby galaxy, preventing the gas from forming into stars. Within a few hundred million years. , that gas cloud can accumulate so much material that it collapses under its own weight, forming a black hole without any star exploding, " Basu said.

Soon, this "seed" black hole could continue to reach the supersized state by swallowing matter from the nearby nebula. From there, it produced the huge quasars that we see today.

According to Basu, this phenomenon can only happen for a short time, about 800 million first years of the universe, before space becomes crowded with stars and other black holes.

Within 1 billion years after the Big Bang, there may be so much background radiation in the universe that a supermassive black hole will be difficult to form because there is not enough gas to suck and continue to grow exponentially.

In 2009, the giant star N6946-BH1 was 1 million times brighter than the Sun was found.In 2015, it disappeared without a trace.Astronomers believe this is rare evidence of a collapsing star in a black hole that does not explode into a supernova.(Photo: NASA).

While DCBHs are still theoretical, some astronomers argue that the Hubble Space Telescope may have actually captured such an object in 2017.

According to other study authors of the same year on this topic, a giant star has disappeared without any explosion. The best explanation is that the giant star collapsed into a black hole without any explosions.

A 2017 study also found that about 1 in 7 (14%) big stars turn into black holes without exploding.