Scientists representing the American aerospace agency NASA have come close to answering a question that has remained a mystery to astrophysicists for a very long time - how supermassive black holes form in the Universe. According to experts, the penultimate stage of this process is the collapse of huge gas clouds.
Experts report that with the help of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, they were able to detect objects that with a very high probability may turn out to be the "seeds" of supermassive black holes. According to astrophysicists, if the discovery is confirmed, this will serve as key evidence of one of the theories of the origin of these objects, according to which they appear as a result of the rapid collapse of gas clouds, bypassing the intermediate stages of this process.
According to modern concepts, supermassive black holes are located in the center of almost all large galaxies, including the Milky Way. As scientists note, they managed to find supermassive black holes, millions and even billions of times the mass of the Sun, which formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang (the current age of the Universe is estimated by experts at about 13.75 billion years). This contradicts one of the theories existing today, according to which black holes, reaching incredible sizes, were originally much smaller, but merged with each other and sucked in gas, thus increasing in size. However, such a process would have to be very long,and therefore the discovered supermassive black holes simply "did not have time" to become such in the young Universe (due to the fact that these black holes are very far from us, we see them as they were a very long time ago). According to scientists, this means that the opposite theory is true - supermassive black holes have huge dimensions and incredible mass since their inception.
The new study has been published in a scientific journal called Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dmitry Erusalimsky