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from the why-did-the-quasar-cross-the-event-horizon dept.
Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and are powered by supermassive black holes capturing matter and simultaneously accelerating particles away from them at near the speed of light. Many quasars, however, date back to the first 800 million years of the universe, long before stars were old enough to collapse, explode in a supernova, and form said supermassive black holes.
Researchers have now modeled the creation of these early black holes sans explosion.
...black holes in the very early universe could have formed by simply accumulating a gargantuan amount of gas into one gravitationally bound cloud. The researchers found that, in a few hundred million years, a sufficiently large such cloud could collapse under its own mass and create a small black hole — no supernova required.
These theoretical objects are known as direct collapse black holes (DCBHs). According to black hole expert Shantanu Basu, lead author of the new study and an astrophysicist at Western University in London, Ontario, one of the defining features of DCBHs is that they must have formed very, very quickly within a very brief time period in the early universe.
The process involves an interaction of two nearby galaxies, one over-actively forming new stars and the other highly gaseous but relatively inactive in star formation.
As new stars form in the busy galaxy, they blast out a constant stream of hot radiation that washes over the neighboring galaxy, preventing the gas there from coalescing into stars of its own. Within a few hundred million years, that starless gas cloud could accrete so much matter that it simply collapses under its own weight, forming a black hole without ever producing a star, Basu found.
According to Basu, black holes that formed at the beginning of that initial 150 Million year window would have grown rapidly, potentially increasing their mass by as much as a factor of 10,000.
Journal Referrence
Shantanu Basu and Arpan Das 2019 ApJL 879 L3 DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ab2646
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 08 2019, @07:51AM (1 child)
For obvious reasons, that's not settled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole#Formation [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by sshelton76 on Monday July 08 2019, @08:12AM
Yes I know there is some debate, but those theories listed in wikipedia fail to take into account quantum effects. Overcoming the EM/weak boundary condition involves a ton of energy and none of this is being accounted for in these models. It is combining the EM/weak into the electroweak force that gives supernovas their immense energies and why we keep finding supernovas and hypernovas at powerscales far beyond anything that GR alone can predict. Keep in mind Gravity is the weakest force. To get gravity to the level where it can overcome any of the other forces requires pumping in immense amounts of matter & energy. Much of this energy leaves as neutrinos and positrons. That energy is not particularly subject to gravity and thus it's effects are felt further afield, as a pressure bubble and likely has enough energy to dispel a diffuse gas bubble that would otherwise be collapsing.