HOW DO BLACK HOLES START?
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| Title: | HOW DO BLACK HOLES START? |
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| Authors: | NATARAJAN, PRIYAMVADA (AUTHOR) |
| Source: | Scientific American. Spring/Summer2026 Special, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p44-49. 6p. 4 Color Photographs, 1 Diagram. |
| Subjects: | Supermassive black holes, Black holes, Quasars, Gravitational waves, Stellar populations, Inflationary universe, Infrared astronomy |
| Abstract: | This article focuses on the puzzle of how the earliest supermassive black holes grew to enormous sizes so soon after the big bang, powering ancient quasars observed less than 500 million years after cosmic origin. Traditional theories propose that these black holes formed from the remnants of the first massive stars (Population III stars) but struggle to explain their rapid growth within the limited time available, given constraints like the Eddington accretion rate. An alternative hypothesis, the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) model, suggests that massive black hole seeds (10^4–10^6 solar masses) formed directly from gas in irradiated, starless primordial disks, enabling faster growth to supermassive scales. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and future gravitational wave observatories like LISA are expected to provide observational evidence to test these scenarios, which have implications for understanding black hole–galaxy coevolution and early cosmic structure formation. [Extracted from the article] |
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| Database: | Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection |
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| Abstract: | This article focuses on the puzzle of how the earliest supermassive black holes grew to enormous sizes so soon after the big bang, powering ancient quasars observed less than 500 million years after cosmic origin. Traditional theories propose that these black holes formed from the remnants of the first massive stars (Population III stars) but struggle to explain their rapid growth within the limited time available, given constraints like the Eddington accretion rate. An alternative hypothesis, the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) model, suggests that massive black hole seeds (10^4–10^6 solar masses) formed directly from gas in irradiated, starless primordial disks, enabling faster growth to supermassive scales. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and future gravitational wave observatories like LISA are expected to provide observational evidence to test these scenarios, which have implications for understanding black hole–galaxy coevolution and early cosmic structure formation. [Extracted from the article] |
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| ISSN: | 00368733 |
