NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made a groundbreaking discovery, uncovering more black holes in the early universe than previously thought possible. This finding could revolutionize our understanding of how supermassive black holes formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Mysterious First Black Holes
For decades, scientists have been perplexed by the presence of supermassive black holes in the very early universe, nearly a billion years after the Big Bang. Such huge gravitational behemoths are too large, surely, to have formed in such a short span of time?
A hint may exist in the new Hubble observations. Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore looks at an artist’s impression of one black hole in orbit around another in the preliminary stages of a spiral galaxy’s merger (Shane Aake/AFP/Getty)Researchers led by scientists from Stockholm University have concluded that there are more black holes influenced the early universe than previously believed. This indicates that some of these black holes could be the remnants of massive stars, not much older than those in the first billion years of cosmic time.
These first stars, which would have formed free of the remnants of earlier generations, and thus could reach size unimaginable today and die as black holes. This may help illuminate how supermassive black holes were already lurking in the centers of galaxies a mere billion years following the Big Bang.— Theory: Thousands of blackholes becrushed into massiveBlack Hole
The Black Hole Census Revealed
To conduct this game-changing study, the researchers analyzed a population of faint galaxies using Hubble around when the universe was only 3% of its current age. Over a stretch of several years, they captured the same patch of sky again and again and noticed certain regions of these faraway galaxies appearing to dim or brightened – an effect that suggests there is black holes within.
In fact, this new method has led the team to discover more black holes than any other method of actively seeking them. One of the shocking revelations is that at least some of these first black holes formed by the direct collapse of massive, primordial stars, and not through the typical paths like collapse in a gas cloud or merger in dense layer.
Learn about Early black holes: To build a complete picture of how galaxies evolved over billions of years, we must get to the bottom of which types formed earliest in the Universe’s history and how they’d grow. The researchers think their discovery is crucial to the development of better models of galaxy formation and evolution, in which black holes play an important part.
Conclusion
Our finding of that further black holes at more advanced times than recently analysed has crucial implications for our knowledge of cosmic evolution. The results imply that at least some of the first black holes in existence arose from the direct collapse of extraordinarily massive, pure stars, rather than forming from runaway merged or collisionally linked pairs later in the cosmic regime. Using this discovery, scientists can now build more precise models of how galaxies and their central black holes formed during the first days of the Universe, which has long been one of the enigmas of astrophysics.
