New Study Finds Radiation from Nearby Galaxies Helped Fuel First Monster Black Holes | Columbia News
http://news.columbia.edu/...nds-Radiation-from-Nearby-Galaxies-Helped-Fuel-First-Monster-Black-Holes
The appearance of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe has puzzled astronomers since their discovery more than a decade ago. A supermassive black hole
is thought to form over billions of years, but more than two dozen of these behemoths have been sighted within 800 million years of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
In a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers from Dublin City University, Columbia University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Helsinki,
add evidence to one theory of how these ancient black holes, about a billion times heavier than our sun, may have formed and quickly put on weight.
In computer simulations, the researchers show that a black hole can rapidly grow at the center of its host galaxy if a nearby galaxy emits enough radiation to switch off
its capacity to form stars. Thus disabled, the host galaxy grows until its eventual collapse, forming a black hole that feeds on the remaining gas, and later, dust, dying
stars, and possibly other black holes, to become super gigantic.
“The collapse of the galaxy and the formation of a million-solar-mass black hole takes 100,000 years — a blip in cosmic time,” says study co-author Zoltan Haiman,
an astronomy professor at Columbia University. “A few hundred-million years later, it has grown into a billion-solar-mass supermassive black hole. This is much
faster than we expected.”
