Latest news with #supermassiveblackholes
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Turns out supermassive black holes are way more common than we thought
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. Supermassive black holes are some of the densest objects found within our universe. These cosmic objects are so heavy that they often weigh billions of times more than our sun, and they're so dense, not even light can escape their grasp. For the most part, we've believed these massive beasts were only found at the center of galaxies. However, new research suggests they might be far more common than we thought. The new study, which is published in The Astrophysical Journal, used data from NASA's InfraRed Astronomy Satellite and the NuSTAR X-ray telescope, which is operated by NASA/JPL. By looking at data from both the infrared and x-ray spectrums, they were able to determine that several of these cosmic objects managed to slip past earlier observations. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 Supermassive black holes should be pretty hard to miss. Just like Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is. While you can't expect see them by going outside and looking up from your backyard, their enormous mass causes ripples and distortions in space, which isn't hard to spot when viewing the universe through a powerful telescope. Despite the immense pull these objects have on the universe, it's still possible to miss them due to unexpected readings or even things like gravitational lensing from other galaxies. And since we still don't know how black holes evolve, there's only so much we can do to spot them. Not to mention there are a ton of less active, silent black holes out there that aren't siphoning off matter and light anymore. So, how exactly did the researchers spot new black holes? Well, according to the findings, they looked at how gas and dust emit light after being heated. From there, they were able to spot several new supermassive black holes hidden in the cosmos. We know that sometimes these cosmic objects can break free of their galaxies, leading to rogue black holes, so it's not too surprising that there are more of them than we previously expected. This is all part of a growing attempt to understand more about how dust interacts within the universe as a whole, and what's going on behind it. While there are likely still thousands (if not millions) of black holes we have yet to discover, this new research at least tells us it is worth looking harder. More Top Deals Amazon gift card deals, offers & coupons 2025: Get $2,000+ free See the
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Tiny ‘primordial' black holes created in the Big Bang may have rapidly grown to supermassive sizes
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Primordial black holes that formed during the earliest moments of the universe could have swollen quickly to supermassive sizes, complex cosmological simulations have revealed. The discovery could lead to a solution for one of the biggest problems in modern cosmology: how supermassive black holes could have grown to be millions or billions of times more massive than the sun before the universe was 1 billion years old. This problem has gotten out of hand recently, thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The powerful scope has been probing the early universe, discovering more and more supermassive black holes that existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang, or even earlier. "The problem here is that, when we view the early universe with more and more powerful telescopes, which effectively allow us to see the cosmos as it was at very early times due to the finite speed of light, we keep seeing supermassive black holes," research team member John Regan, a Royal Society University research fellow at Maynooth University in Ireland, told "This means that supermassive black holes are in place very early in the universe, within the first few hundred million years." The processes that scientists previously proposed to explain the growth of supermassive black holes, such as rapid matter accretion and mergers between larger and larger black holes, should take more than a billion years to grow a supermassive black hole. The earliest and most distant supermassive black hole discovered thus far by JWST is CEERS 1019, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass 9 million times that of the sun. That's too big to exist 13.2 billion years or so ago, according to the established models. "This is confusing, as the black holes must either appear at this large mass or grow from a smaller mass extremely quickly," Regan said. "We have no evidence to suggest that black holes can form with these huge masses, and we don't fully understand how small black holes could grow so rapidly." The new research suggests that primordial black holes could have given early supermassive black holes a head start in this race. Black holes come in an array of different masses. Stellar-mass black holes, which are 10 to 100 times heftier than the sun, are created when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel an die, collapsing to trigger huge supernova explosions. Supermassive black holes have at least one million times the mass of the sun and sit at the heart of all large galaxies. They're too large to be formed when a massive star dies. Instead, these black holes are created when smaller black holes merge countless times, or by ravenously feeding on surrounding matter, or in a combination of both processes. These two examples of black holes, as well as elusive intermediate-mass black holes, which sit in the mass gulf between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes, are classed as "astrophysical" black holes. Scientists have long proposed the existence of "non-astrophysical" black holes, in the form of primordial black holes. The "non-astrophysical" descriptor refers to the fact that these black holes don't rely on collapsing stars or prior black holes for their existence. Instead, primordial black holes are proposed to form directly from overdense pockets in the soup of steaming-hot matter that filled the universe in the first second after the Big Bang. There is no observational evidence of these primordial black holes thus far. However, that hasn't stopped scientists from suggesting that these hypothetical objects could account for dark matter, the mysterious "stuff" that accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe but remains invisible because it doesn't interact with light. The new research suggests that primordial black holes, proposed to have masses between 1/100,000th that of a paperclip and 100,000 times that of the sun, could have a big advantage in rapidly forming supermassive black holes. That's because the upper limit on their mass isn't restricted by how massive a star can get before it dies, as is the case with stellar mass black holes. "Primordial black holes should form during the first few seconds after the Big Bang. If they exist, they have some advantages over astrophysical black holes," Regan said. "They can, in principle, be more massive to begin with compared to astrophysical black holes and may be able to settle more easily into galactic centers, where they can rapidly grow." Primordial black holes can also get a head start on stellar-mass black holes, because they don't have to wait for the first generation of massive stars to die — a process that could take millions of years. Regan explained that, due to their origins, astrophysical black holes can form only after the first stars run out of fuel. Even then, astrophysical black holes can still be just a few hundred solar masses in total. Additionally, negatively impacting the prospect of supermassive black hole growth from stellar-mass black holes is the fact that the energy emitted from stars during their lives and their explosive supernova deaths clears material from around the newborn black holes, depleting their potential larder and curtailing their growth. "That can mean that there is no material for the baby black hole to accrete," Regan explained. Primordial black holes wouldn't emit energy and wouldn't "go 'nova, eliminating this hindrance. But, they would still need to find their way to an abundant source of matter. In the simulation performed by Regan and colleagues, primordial black holes needed to grow by accreting matter, with black hole mergers taking a backseat in the process. "Matter in the early universe is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium," Regan continued. "These primordial black holes are expected to mostly grow by accreting hydrogen and helium. Mergers with other primordial black holes may also play a role, but accretion is expected to be dominant." For the matter accretion of primordial black holes to be efficient enough to result in the creation of supermassive black holes, these objects need to be able to rapidly gobble up matter. That means making their way to regions of the universe where matter congregates — namely, the center of galaxies, which also happens to be where supermassive black holes lurk in the modern epoch of the cosmos. "For this, primordial black holes need to sink to the center of a galaxy," Regan said. "This can happen if there are enough primordial black holes. Only a few have to get lucky!" The number of primordial black holes available for this process determines whether astrophysical black holes would eventually play a role in the growth of early supermassive black holes. "If primordial black holes are very abundant, then they can make up the whole supermassive black hole population," Regan said. "Whether primordial black holes account for the entire mass of early supermassive black holes depends on how many there are. In principle, it's possible, but my guess is that astrophysical black holes play a role, too." Of course, these findings are based on simulations, so there is a long way to go before this theory can be confirmed. One line of observational evidence for this theory would be the detection of a massive black hole in the very, very early universe, prior even to 500 million years after the Big Bang. Another possible line of observational evidence would be the detection of a black hole with a mass smaller than three times that of the sun in the modern-day universe. That's because no black hole so small could have formed from the supernova death and collapse of a massive star, indicating this diminutive black hole grew from a primordial one. "I was surprised that primordial black holes grew so rapidly and that our simulations at least matched the parameter space in which they can exist," Regan said. "All we need now is a 'smoking gun' of a primordial black hole from observations — either a very low-mass black hole in the present-day universe or a really high-mass black hole in the very early universe. "Primordial black holes, if they exist, will be hiding in the extremes!" Related Stories: — A 'primordial' black hole may zoom through our solar system every decade — Primordial black holes may flood the universe. Could one hit Earth? — Tiny black holes left over from the Big Bang may be prime dark matter suspects In lieu of such observational evidence, the team will seek to improve their cosmological simulations to strengthen the theory of supermassive black holes starting off as primordial black holes. "The next steps are to increase the realism of the simulations. This was a first step. The simulations only had primordial black holes," Regan concluded. "Next, we want to model primordial and astrophysical black holes in the same environment and see if we can see any distinguishing characteristics." The team's research appears as a pre-peer review paper on the repository site arXiv.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers discover ultrapowerful black hole jet as bright as 10 trillion suns lit by Big Bang's afterglow
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have discovered extraordinarily powerful X-ray jets blasting from two supermassive black holes that are so ancient that the jets shine in the afterglow of the Big Bang. "They are transforming the first light of the universe into high-energy jets," Jaya Maithil, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told reporters Monday (June 9) at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska. Using data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), Maithil and her team found that each jet spans a whopping 300,000 light-years — nearly three times the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. Each jet emerges from an actively feeding supermassive black hole, known as a quasar, located about 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away. The researchers observed these immense structures as they appeared when the universe was just 3 billion years old, during a period when galaxies and their central black holes were growing at breakneck speed. "These quasars are like cosmic time capsules," Maithil said. "If we understand them, we can understand how they were impacting the growth of their galaxy and the environment in which they resided." One of the newfound jets, from a quasar known as J1610+1811, is visible in the Chandra image above. A slender, faint purple line extends from the quasar's brilliant white core toward the upper right, ending in a small, bright blob. A second, dimmer jet appears to shoot in the opposite direction, downward and to the left. "It's like looking for candlelight in close vicinity to a flashlight that's blazing toward us," Maithil said. Related: Hungry black hole shoots out bright X-ray jet 60,000 times hotter than the sun What makes these jets particularly noteworthy is that they remain visible across billions of light-years. In a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, Maithil and her team suggested that the jets shine in X-rays thanks to interactions with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the faint relic radiation from the Big Bang left over after the universe cooled enough for starlight to travel freely for the first time, marking the end of the "cosmic dark ages." Back when these jets formed, the CMB was far denser than it is today, filling space with a sea of low-energy photons. As electrons in the jets raced outward at near light speed, they slammed into these CMB photons, boosting them into the X-ray range detectable by Chandra, according to the new study. RELATED STORIES —Brightest quasar ever seen is powered by black hole that eats a 'sun a day' —How black-hole-powered quasars killed off neighboring galaxies in the early universe —Distant 'quasar tsunamis' are ripping their own galaxies apart This process makes them visible across cosmic gulfs, despite their proximity to the quasars' dazzling cores, the researchers said. The jet from J1610+1811 clocks in at 92% to 98% light, carrying about half as much energy as all the light emitted by matter spiraling into the black hole — a staggering output equivalent to that from 10 trillion suns, the new study found. The second quasar, J1405+0415, located 11.7 billion light-years from Earth, features a jet just as powerful. By combining Chandra's X-ray and VLA's radio data, the researchers calculated that particles in the J1405+0415 jet are traveling at 95% to 99% the speed of light. "We're finding that some black holes may carry a bigger punch at this stage in the universe than we thought," Maithil said in a statement.
