Presto! Black Hole Creates a Galaxy

[mickw]

Astronomers have long wondered which came first, the black hole or the galaxy around it. The leading theory holds that the two co-evolve, starting small and building over time.

But colossal black holes may zap galaxies into existence from scratch, new observations suggest.

Astronomers recently observed a peculiar large black hole that did not belong to a surrounding galaxy as expected. Until now, scientists thought that this black hole's host galaxy was merely shrouded in dust and rendered invisible to us.

The black hole, designated HE0450-2958, is located about 5 billion light-years away from Earth. It is a type of supermassive black hole known as a quasar, which releases extremely bright jets of high-energy light.

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[mickw]

The biggest black holes in the universe are also the most perplexing. Scientists have long been confused about just how the earliest, most massive black holes formed, but new evidence now suggests they could have originated inside giant cocoon-like stars.

This idea is at odds with the prevailing thinking that large black holes are created by the clumping together of smaller black holes.

Not so, says University of Colorado at Boulder astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman. Rather, these behemoth black holes likely formed in the middle of even larger supermassive stars that could have held tens of millions of times the mass of our sun, according to Begelman.

"Until recently, the thinking by many has been that supermassive black holes got their start from the merging of numerous, small black holes in the universe," Begelman said. "This new model of black hole development indicates a possible alternate route to their formation."

Begelman studied how these gigantic stars could have formed, and how massive their cores might have been, to understand how they might have given rise to huge black holes. The results of his investigation will be published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

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