According to existing cognition, supermassive black holes need to slowly grow to today’s size by accretion of matter, so they generally have galaxy centers and evolve through the inflow of galactic medium or the merger of other galaxies. However, not all supermassive black holes sit obediently in galaxies, and some may be skewed as they grow and walk in the universe like wanderers. According to a new study, the number of such homeless supermassive black holes may be more than imagined.
There are a large number of interstellar planets in the universe that do not revolve around any star, that is to say, they do not have many planetary brothers and sisters like the earth, but float alone in the universe. In theory, there are such supermassive black holes wandering alone in the universe, but they are basically unobservable, so it is difficult to quantify the numbers.
Now astronomers have established a new model that will be able to help us calculate how many wandering supermassive black holes may exist in the universe today. On the other hand, it may also be able to unravel how supermassive black holes form and grow.
Supermassive black holes (SMBH) exist in all (at least most) galaxy nuclei in the universe, and their mass is roughly proportional to the mass of the host galaxy, indicating that the evolution of the black hole and the host galaxy is connected in some way. However, in fact, the formation of supermassive black holes is still unclear. We know that stellar black holes are formed by the collapse of massive stars. However, this mechanism does not apply to black holes with a mass exceeding 55 times the mass of the sun. The theory is that supermassive black holes are formed by Accretion of gas, dust, and merging with other black holes appear.
This process is quite long, and variables are likely to occur midway. For example, the two black holes cannot be merged and they are kicked away. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics team used ROMULUS simulations to calculate this probability.
The simulation results show that in about 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the number and brightness of wandering supermassive black holes exceed those at the center of the galaxy. In fact, there may be an average of 12 supermassive black holes in a galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Usually wandering away from the center of the galaxy halo.
These supermassive black holes are not necessarily active (after all, there is nothing for them to eat), so it is difficult to be found. Next, the team will carefully consider our possible methods for observing these wandering supermassive black holes. The new paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society).
Although, what we have to do before that may be to find a large number of stellar black holes and theoretically medium-mass black holes…
(The source of the first image: Pixabay)
