It’s no secret that supermassive black holes are heartless beasts: These objects of immense gravity that let nothing, not even light escape, have fascinated astronomers since the early 20th century. While it’s believed that so-called supermassive black holes lurk at the center of most galaxies, including our own, there’s still much we don’t know about how they formed, or why, except to remind us of our own mortality. But new research from an international team of scientists might have some answers to at least one of the critical questions -- namely, how supermassive black holes, which range in size from millions to billions of solar masses, apparently formed very quickly in the early universe. Using computer simulations, the researchers found that these giants can grow incredibly fast if they can suck the life (read: radiation) out of a nearby galaxy, disabling their host galaxy’s ability to create stars...The researchers found that the neighboring galaxy supplying the radiation had to be a certain size and distance away from the black hole’s host galaxy -- though these cosmic energy sources could be smaller and closer galaxies than other studies estimated. “The nearby galaxy can’t be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold,” study co-author John Wise, an associate astrophysics professor at Georgia Tech, said. Wise is an associate professor in the School of Physics.
