Black holes: Have two great mysteries been resolved by the same simulation?

A computer simulation led by Irish and Dutch astrophysicists has just given a very interesting result of thorny cosmological problems. Let’s first see what these two mysteries are and how the team responds based on the results of their simulation.

The first concerns the growth of supermassive black holes. They actually weigh from a few million to several billion solar masses. However, the age of the universe is not enough to explain how, by fusion with other black holes from stars, they would have reached such masses so quickly. The problem is even more striking when you know that the James-Webb space telescope discovered a supermassive black hole, baptized Ceers 1019, “weighing” 9 million times the mass of the sun in the universe of only 570 million years. The equivalent of the first babbling of an infant …

Black holes as tiny as 1/100,000th of trombone or large as 100,000 suns

The existence of so -called primordial black holes is the other of these mysteries. Theoretical physics allows black holes to be born in the first moments of the universe, Post Big Bang, when it was a very hot plasma, without the stars still exist. Except that today, there is no trace. They disappeared by Hawking influence ? We don’t know anything about it. In this recent study, researchers propose that these primordial black holes may have had a mass as tiny as 1/100,000th of that of a trombone, or large as 100,000 of our sun.

It is perhaps the deepest astrophysical mysteries who have just found their justification in a fairly elegant way, since one would partly explain the other. One of these puzzles is that of the origin of the supermassive black holes found in the center of the galaxies, while the second is whether the primordial black holes, well described by theoretical physics, really or not exist.

The idea that several teams of physicists and astrophysicists are pursuing is that the black holes born of the even fluctuations of the universe, just after the Big Bang, could have merged very quickly and in very large numbers to give the giant black holes of the galactic centers.

If the primordial black holes were numerous in the center of the galaxies, then …

To explain the observed presence of these supermassive black holes, there are usually two hypotheses: either first generation colossal stars explode by giving so -called “light” “seeds” to form these immense entities; Either gas clouds collapse directly in black holes – these are the so -called “heavy” “seeds”.

Now here is what John Redan says: “Primordial black holes should form during the first seconds after the Big Bang. If they exist, they have certain advantages compared to astrophysical black holes. They can in principle be more massive than the latter and more easily installed in the center of galaxies, where they can develop quickly.”

The simulation of the team of astrophysicists shows that if the primordial black holes are in large number, or sufficiently massive, and that they sink into the central regions of the galaxies, then they could do everything to be at the origin of the supermassive black holes observed in the first one hundred million years of the universe. If this hypothesis turned out to be the right one, it would mean that we have at the heart of the Milky Way a remainder of the first seconds of the universe: the Sagittarius supermassive hole*.

Researchers now want to strengthen their simulation by adding astrophysical black holes to see how they merge together. They would also like to discover a witness of this crucial era: “All we need now is a tangible proof of the existence of a primordial black hole from observations. Either a very low mass hole in the current universe, or a very high black hole in the primitive universe.”

Want to save even more? Discover Our promo codes Selected for you.