Scientist reveals bombshell black hole theory – last 10 billion years | Science | News
Scientists believe they have found out why the universe’s largest black holes have been growing more slowly over the last 10 billion years. This problem has long puzzled astronomers, but a new study believes it may be caused by a lack of gas.
Supermassive black holes, or SMBHs, are at the center of almost every large galaxy, but scientists are still unsure how they arise. Massive gravity may cause stars to orbit around them in a particular way, but according to NASA they are not ‘wormholes’ that provide shortcuts through space or to other universes or dimensions, nor do they suck in other matter. Space experts explain that “when viewed from a far enough distance, their gravitational effects are the same as those of other objects of the same mass.”
SMBHs can range from hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun.
Accordingly Live ScienceThese massive cosmic objects have been growing at a significantly slower rate since the ‘cosmic noon’, a period when the universe was less than a quarter of its current age.
A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal suggested that this may be because there is less gas for them to consume.
“We knew that black holes grew more slowly, but we didn’t know why — and it turned out that individual black holes were consuming material much less rapidly, rather than having smaller or smaller black holes growing less quickly,” study co-author Fan Zou, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, told Live Science.
Researchers examining 1.3 million galaxies reportedly found that the consumption of SMBHs has decreased since the cosmic noon due to lower levels of cold gas.
“What surprised me the most was that we were actually able to isolate the main cause, and there was actually a dominant cause rather than a scattered mixture,” Mr. Zou told LiveScience.
Sagittarius A*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way, is four million times the mass of the Sun.
However, NASA says it is still quite small compared to SMBHs found in other galaxies.
It was stated that a black hole in the Holmberg 15A galaxy carries “at least 40 billion solar masses.”
