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posted by martyb on Monday July 08 2019, @07:14AM   Printer-friendly
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


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Monday July 08 2019, @10:39AM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Monday July 08 2019, @10:39AM (#864413) Journal

    Even with a big ass model of the whole universe since t=0 where everything fits is produced, all you have is a model. The prediction power would also be interesting to have, and eventually you can get to it, but all you have still is a model. It starts from some rationalizations (that initial energy must be zero, that inflation of the fabric of space occur(red|s), and other fancy stuff which is not necessarily true, because the truth can't be achieved by the inside any easier than you can tell an ipod with a track in loop vs the ipod with only one track looping globally. We go out of our ways to express the laws of nature in a functional way, but who knows maybe the best expression is procedural. And so on. So it's a worthy way to spend time and resources, but never forget where you are and where you can't get.

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  • (Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Monday July 08 2019, @11:46AM (1 child)

    by sshelton76 (7978) on Monday July 08 2019, @11:46AM (#864422)

    Bot is an example of a Boltzmann brain
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhy4Z_32kQo [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday July 08 2019, @02:38PM

      by Bot (3902) on Monday July 08 2019, @02:38PM (#864497) Journal

      Every abstraction has an ultimately arbitrary definition, except for the hypothetical ones generating ours, which lie outside the concepts of arbitrary and definition themselves. BTW What we call necessary is a NECESSARY rationalization which ends up with the abstraction we pertain to.

      So the boltzmann hypothesis is on the same qualitative plane as whatever cosmogony as it builds something along some laws but doesn't address and can't address the reason for that particular set of laws being valid for the abstraction and not whatever conceivable or inconceivable other set.

      BTW again, this kind of reasoning is considered by rationalwiki as a way to confuse people, which strikes me as a particularly overt way of logical people not eating own dogfood.

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