Image: Illustration by Gavin Potenza
In Brief
- Black holes with a billion times the sun’s mass already existed early in the universe. How did these behemoths grow so big, so fast? What process formed the “seed” black holes from which they grew?
- Did the death throes of the first stars provide numerous small seeds that then merged together, or did vast primordial gas clouds bypass the star stage and collapse to form larger seeds directly?
- Astronomers are trying to solve this mystery by finding and analyzing leftover seeds—“middleweight” black holes. Early indications suggest that middleweights formed by direct collapse.
Astronomers have known for some 10 years that nearly every large galaxy contains at its core an immense black hole—an object having such intense gravity that even light cannot escape. The death of stars can produce small black holes—with masses ranging from about three to 100 times the mass of the sun—but such stellar-mass black holes are tiny compared with the behemoths at the centers of galaxies, measuring millions to billions of solar masses.
These supermassive black holes pose major puzzles: Why are they so common in galaxies? Which came first—the galaxy or the hole? And how did they form in the first place?
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4 Comments
Add CommentDirections to produce multiple black holes that inhabit any and all cells.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExperiment 180 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=living-in-a-quantum-world#comment-01
Middleweight Black Holes: Clues to the Universe's Evolution
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis star was ability to spent the max.energy as 2.784x10^36 Jules / sec, calculated following equation of Unification of Physics written in my book "COMPLETE UNIFIED THEORY (1998). Due to this type of radiation,the star will turn to Black Hole. After turning to black hole, its quantum circulation will 3.044x10^-26m^2/sec.
Nirmalendu Das. Email: nirmalgopa@gmail.com
Dated: 16-01-2012.
As you know the word"goldilocks" means:a golden hair person.The context of this article is about the ways of supermassive blackholes formation.So,What is the relation between the word"goldilocks" and the subject of article?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm a translator.Please help me.
Thanks
In 2009 Nussbeck/Stewart imaged a cloud of gas swirling around a Black Event Horizon 88 degrees North of Proxima 16 light years from Earth, this cloud was within local distance to a bininary star system. The center of the cloud was Black with no background light emmissions and was drawing surface material from both Stars into the Swirling gas vortex.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe image was extracted from a 2006 2MASS jpl/caltech photo and was immediately believed to be a SBH (small black hole) and the image sent to the Naval Obvervator and to scientists around the world. The Naval Observator had many conversation with Nussbeck and would not comment on the existance of the Black Hole until recently when it was confirmed that a Black Hole with the Mass of 3 Earth Sun's was found approximately 16 light years from Earth 88 degree's North of Proxima.
Nussbeck\Stewart used ORIE (optical remote imaging enhancement) a true electron color magnification process to find the Black Hole. "ORIE can find Black Holes as easy as telescopes can find planets in Earths solar system."
By studying SBH we could find the answers we seek to Middleweight and Superheavyweight Black Holes....
Ronald Nussbeck