Credit: University of Portsmouth
The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed, something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years, has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings are published in Nature.
The existence of more than 200 quasars fed by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang had continued to be one of the major problems of astrophysics because it was never fully understood how they formed so soon.
The team of experts led by Dr Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth has discovered that the first quasars formed naturally under the violent and turbulent conditions of rare gas deposits in the early universe.
Dr Whalen, of the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: “This discovery is especially exciting because it has turned 20 years of thought upside down about the origin of the first supermassive black holes in the universe.
This video shows a supercomputer simulation of the birth of a primordial quasar. Credit: University of Portsmouth
“We found supermassive black holes in the center of most massive galaxies today, which may be millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. But in 2003 we began to find quasars: very bright supermassive black holes and of active accretion that are like cosmic beacons of the early universe, which existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. And no one understood how they formed in such early times. “
A few years ago, supercomputer simulations showed that the first quasars could form at the junctions of rare, cold, powerful gas currents. Only a dozen of these existed in a volume of space a billion light-years in diameter, but the black hole was to have 100,000 solar masses at birth. Black holes today form when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse, but usually only have between 10 and 100 solar masses.
Astrophysicists had long theorized that between 10,000 and 100,000 solar-mass stars formed in the early universe, but only in exotic and refined environments such as strong ultraviolet backgrounds or supersonic fluxes between gas and dark matter that did not have no resemblance to the turbulent clouds in which the former formed quasars.
Dr. Whalen said, “We think of these stars as a bit like dinosaurs on earth, they were huge and primitive. And they had a short life, living only a quarter of a million years before collapsing into black holes.
“Our supercomputer models date back to very ancient times and found that cold, dense streams of gas capable of growing a billion black holes of solar mass in just a few hundred million years created their supermassive stars themselves without the need for unusual environments, cold currents caused turbulence in the cloud that prevented normal stars from forming until the cloud became so massive that it collapsed catastrophically by its own weight, forming two stars. gigantic primordials, one that had 30,000 solar masses and another that had 40,000.
“Consequently, the only primordial clouds that could form a quasar just after the cosmic dawn – when the first stars in the universe formed – also conveniently created their own massive seeds. This simple and beautiful result not only explains the origin of the first quasars but also their demography: their number in the early days.
“The first supermassive black holes were simply a natural consequence of the formation of structures in cold dark matter cosmologies: children of the cosmic network.”
The paper “The Turbulent Origins of the First Quasars” is published in Nature.
Did the black holes form immediately after the Big Bang? More information: Daniel Whalen, The turbulent cold flows gave birth to the first quasars, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-022-04813-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04813-y Provided by the University of Portsmouth
Citation: Scientists discover how the first quasars in the universe formed (2022, July 6) recovered on July 6, 2022
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