Scientists May Have Solved the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes

Supermassive black holes sit at the center of nearly every massive galaxy situated in the universe. Scientists don’t know how supermassive black holes form, but a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy, illustrates a theory crazy enough to perhaps work. The running hypothesis is that black holes are born out of the collapse of a star, which can eventually suck up enough mass that they grow into supermassive black holes (SBHs). That process is thought to take billions of years, but scientists have already catalogued some SBHs that date back to 13.8 billion years in age — also the age of the universe. This would mean that some SBHs, if not all, form much more quickly than scientists originally suspected...If a huge nearby galaxy could pump enough radiation into a smaller galaxy that already hosted a black hole, the radiation could split molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen, stopping the galaxy from forming new stars and ultimately forcing it to collapse under the gravitational pressure of the black hole. Thus, the black hole would suck up that mass and quickly become an SBH...“The nearby galaxy can’t be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold,” said John Wise, co-author of the study and associate astrophysics professor at Georgia Tech. Wise is an associate professor in the School of Physics.