Researchers have created a model that shows how the first quasars could have formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. They proved that supermassive black holes can be created by colossal gas flows.
Supermassive black holes in the early Universe
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth have created a model that shows how quasars formed in the very early Universe. Each of these objects represents the active core of the Galaxy. At its center is a supermassive black hole. Now such objects are mainly growing due to the merging of smaller singularities.
The only problem is that people know at least 200 quasars that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, which marked the beginning of the existence of our Universe. Currently, the era of reionization has not yet ended. The first stars had just begun to appear in space, and naturally supermassive black holes would not have had time to form.
For a long time, scientists could not resolve the contradictions between the current mechanism of growth of supermassive black holes and the existence of quasars at such an early epoch. And now an alternative mechanism for their formation has been found.
First quasars formed from gas
Scientists have long established that during the so-called “dark ages”, when the age of the Universe was measured only in hundreds of millions of years, up to 100 thousand individual stars could already exist in it, resulting from the collision of cold gas flows. Scientists decided to check whether these processes could sometimes be more extensive.
It turned out that in a cube with a side of 1 billion light-years, there must necessarily be such a strong collision of gas masses that, as a result, its matter was compacted. Giant stars with a mass of 30-40 thousand Solar masses were formed. They exploded almost immediately and gave birth to the embryos of black holes.
Then the quasars, apparently, grew by absorbing the surrounding matter directly. This conclusion finally explains the paradox of the existence of young quasars in the early Universe. But it also leads to unexpected consequences.
We are used to the fact that supermassive black holes are always in the center of some galaxy. However, the new model shows that the oldest of the quasars may not be surrounded by any star system. It is possible that luminaries begin to gather around such a “primary” quasar over time.
According to phys.org
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