:: OSEL.CZ :: - Supermassive black holes may have been born from colossal stars

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Simulation of a supernova megastar of the young universe. Credit: Ke-Jung Chen / Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics

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There are supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. They are unseen monsters that usually weigh millions of Suns. Sometimes to billions of suns. It is difficult to imagine such a thing, but the universe is already like that. You can find practically everything in it. The problem is that we observe large supermassive black holes in a very young universe. So young that, according to current theories of black holes, they wouldn’t have a chance to “grow up” during that time.

Takashi Moriya. Kredit: DIAS (The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies).

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Takashi Moriya of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his colleagues found an interesting “shortcut” that could change the situation. According to them, the germs of supermassive black holes could penetrate the extinction of monumental primordial stars, much larger than today’s largest known stars. According to them, these primordial stars exploded like megasuperns. The remnants of these fascinating explosions could be found over time thanks to a new generation of telescopes.

At present, we usually imagine that the primordial stars had a mass of about 100 to 200 Suns. They were soon to explode like supernovae, creating black holes that would begin to devour the surrounding matter. This is quite easy to imagine, because similar stars, although rare, still exist today.

James Webb’s long-awaited space telescope. Credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons.

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But, from what we know about black holes, their evolution, and the universe, it is unlikely that this style could create gigantic supermassive black holes in the young universe. Little time and little “food”. And yet we watch them there.

Moriya et al. they believe that a number of megastars, tens of thousands of Suns, formed at the beginning of the universe. Unlike other fans of this concept, however, they believe that they did not collapse into a large black hole without a supernova explosion. They simulated the radiation of such a supernova and concluded that it should be a very bright event, the glow of which will be significantly shifted by the red shift, ie to the red end of the spectrum.

Most interestingly, this glow, if any, should be detected by next-generation telescopes that can capture near-infrared radiation. Such a telescope will be, for example, the James Webb Space Telescope, which should be launched into space this autumn. Researchers believe that it could detect the afterglow of these supernovae of megastars from the dawn of space and thus verify their hypothesis. We’ll see what happens.

Video: Takashi Moriya | Light-curve and spectral properties of ultra-stripped core-collapse supernovae