Astronomers have discovered three supermassive black holes in the early universe that have become a billion times heavier than the Sun in just one hundred thousand years, which is impossible from the point of view of modern astronomical theories, according to an article published in the Astrophysical Journal.
“No current theoretical model can explain the existence of these objects. Their discovery in the early Universe casts doubt on current theories of the formation of black holes, and now we have to create new models to explain how galaxies and black holes arise,”says Joseph Hennawi of the University of California at Santa Barbara (USA).).
It is believed that the centers of most massive galaxies are home to supermassive black holes, whose mass can range from a million to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The reasons for the formation of these objects are not yet entirely clear. Scientists initially believed that such objects arose in the same way as their normal "cousins" - as a result of the gravitational collapse of stars and the subsequent merger of several large black holes.
Observations of the first galaxies in the Universe made astrophysicists doubt this - it turned out that they were inhabited by black holes with a mass of tens of billions of Suns. Such objects, as calculations show, simply would not have time to grow to such a size if they were born small. Therefore, some scientists began to believe that supermassive black holes are born in more exotic scenarios - as a result of the collapse of giant clouds of "pure" atomic hydrogen or due to clumps of dark matter.
Hennawi and his colleagues found further evidence that black holes in the early Universe grew too fast, disrupting all ideas about their evolution. Researchers have discovered six supermassive black holes at once, which we see in the state in which they were only 850 million years after the Big Bang.
The first galaxies of the Universe had just begun to form at this time and, as scientists previously believed, black holes in their centers could not be "heavyweights" that are not inferior in mass to modern quasars. The three black holes found by the Henawi team with the Keck-II telescope in Hawaii contradict this idea - they are about a billion times heavier than the Sun, which is thousands of times the mass of the Sgr A * black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
In accordance with modern ideas about the evolution of galaxies, a black hole can gain such a mass by absorbing matter about the same as the universe exists, which was impossible for quasars born in the first billion years of its life. Even if they “ate” continuously and constantly absorbed gas and dust, their growth would be delayed for hundreds of millions of years, which is possible, but unlikely.
The authors of the article decided to find an answer to this question, using a simple pattern from the life of such objects. When black holes "dine," they eject jets into the surrounding space, narrow beams of superhot matter that travel at near-light speeds. These jets heat up the intergalactic space and ionize it, making it more "transparent" to light. Accordingly, the more transparent the galaxy's environment is, the longer the "lunch" of the black hole in its center lasts.
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Much to the surprise of astronomers, the neighborhoods of all three galaxies - CFHQS J2229 + 1457, SDSS J1335 + 3533, and SDSS J0100 + 2802 - were unexpectedly opaque, indicating that black holes in their centers had been actively absorbing matter for no more than 100 thousand years. Such high "appetites" of black holes do not fit into any theoretical framework, and their discovery, as scientists point out, speaks in favor of alternative theories of the formation and growth of quasars.
“We would like to find other similar objects. Their discovery was a great success for us, and the discovery of other black holes in the early Universe will indicate that many quasars may be much younger than we previously thought,”concludes Christina Eilers, a university colleague at Hennawi.
