Research has found that black holes can eat incredibly fast 40 times higher than the theoretical limit |

[Naidheachdan New Tang Dynasty, 17 Samhain, 2024, àm Beijing]Super Massiveblack holeas eachgalaxyCentral? Until recently, the explanation of this problem was not difficult: the density of matter was the highest there, and black holes had billions of years to feed it and grow. However, with the advent of the Webb telescope, more and more supermassive black holes from the early universe were discovered. These black holes do not eat slowly, but they eat in a feverish manner to grow to such large sizes.

But the Webb telescope may have just found a breakthrough in this question. he foundblack holeit seems theoretically within millions of yearsend40 hoursspeedFeeding, which allows them to grow at a rate sufficient to create a massive black hole. This is newResearchPublished in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 4.

Black holes grow and existend

Material about to fall into a black hole usually first gathers into what is called an accretion disk, which surrounds the black hole and is heated by collisions with other parts of the disk, while losing energy in the form of radiation. Eventually, if enough energy is lost, the matter will collapse into the black hole. The more matter there is, the brighter the accretion disk is, and the radiation it emits scatters more matter. The point where the matter is pushed away by radiation pressure and the matter attracted by the black hole reaches equilibrium is called the “Eddington limit”. The bigger the black hole, the higher this rate becomes.

This is a challenge for supermassive black holes. The way we currently know black holes are created – when massive stars die in supernova explosions to create black holes – usually only produces black holes with a mass of about a few times the sun. Even taking into account the presence of unusually massive stars in the early universe as well as some black hole mergers, most supermassive black holes are expected to be only about 100 times more massive than the size of the sun in their seed stages. Although there are theories that suggest that the direct collapse of gas clouds could bypass the intermediate stages of star formation and immediately form black holes with 10,000 times the mass of the Sun or more, these still just a hypothesis.

Nevertheless, a black hole must absorb a lot of matter before it reaches supermassiveness. However, based on the lack of X-ray emission, most supermassive black holes observed by the Webb telescope had accretion rates around 20% of the Eddington limit. This could mean that they must have fed beyond the Eddington limit early in their history, or that they were already supermassive black holes from the start.

Focus on the black hole LID-568

This new reportResearchObject LID-568, was originally observed using the Chandra X-ray Telescope, an observatory that was threatened with closure recently. LID-568 is very bright at X-ray wavelengths, which allowed Chandra to see and indicate that it was consuming at a very high rate. Infrared images showed that it appeared to be a point source, leading the team to conclude that most of the light we see comes from the accretion disk rather than the area in is it.galaxystars in.

However, this makes it difficult to determine the details of the black hole’s environment or calculate its age relative to the Big Bang. So researchers pointed the Webb telescope at it to capture details that other observatories could not.

Spectroscopic analysis revealed that the LID-568 we see now existed about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The region has a low production of gas and dust, indicating that the black hole is located in a dwarf galaxy. Based on the production of hydrogen, researchers estimate that the size of the black hole is about 1 million times larger than the sun.

40 times longer than the theoretical limit

Its mass is actually similar to some of the black holes identified by the Webb Telescope in older galaxies, but it is much brighter, equal to the luminosity of objects 10 times its mass, and it also has an X that these black holes do not have Ray radiation. . In fact, it’s so light compared to its mass that researchers believe it would only be able to emit so much radiation well past the “Eddington” limit. They estimated that in the end the black hole exceeded the Eddington limit 40 times.

The key is that Webb was able to move two pieces of matter towards each other at high speeds, based on the blue shift of hydrogen radiation lines. This data shows that the materialspeedMore than 500 kilometers per second and extending tens of thousands of light years away from the black hole. Apparently, these clumps of material are also hiding similar material that is moving away from us. Based on their apparent length and distance, and assuming they represent gas driven by the black hole, the researchers can estimate how far the black hole is has been emitting such intense radiation.

Based on these calculations, researchers estimate that the original mass of the black hole was about 100 times greater than the sun. They concluded: “This lifetime suggests that a significant portion of LID-568’s mass growth may have come from an accretion event beyond the Eddington limit for more than 10 million years.”

Researchers suspect that this intense activity affects the formation of stars in the galaxy, which is one reason for the lack of stars in its system. This may explain why we see some supermassive black holes in the current universe, located at the center of relatively small galaxies.

What does that mean?

In some ways, this could be good news for cosmologists. The ability to form supermassive black holes so quickly, relative to the size and age of the black holes observed by Webb, requires that they have been consuming at or slightly above the Eddington limit for most of their lifetimes. , which is considered unlikely. However, if the Eddington limit can be exceeded 40 times over 10 million years, this no longer seems to be an issue.

But at the same time, the graph of mass and brightness of super black holes created by the research team shows that LID-568 represents a special category of black holes. If many black holes are consuming at this stage, it should be easy to identify many similar black holes. For this reason, researchers are studying other X-ray sources to see if other black holes can be found in this region.

(Reprinted from The Epoch Times / Editor: Ye Ping)

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