Analyzing Black Holes at the Edge of the Early Universe

In the near future, astronomers could become able to conduct in-depth studies of supermassive stars that may have existed at the fringes of the early Universe. These objects may have been the progenitors of what would become the first supermassive black holes ever to exist.

Instruments such as the NASA James Webb Space Telescope – which is currently proposed for cancellation – will be essential in this direction. The JWST is capable of peering very far away into the history of the Universe, back to a time when the first stars brought light onto the firmament.

Using this machine, astronomers will be able to search for the extremely large progenitor stars, which were most likely enveloped in a cocoon of other stars. This may have contributed to smothering the vast amounts of X-rays they produced.

The reason why this is important is because the release of massive amounts of radiation would have otherwise blasted away the vast volumes of hydrogen gas and cosmic dust that surrounded the stars.

If that happened, then nothing would have remained to feed the stars and the black hole that formed after its death. From this angle, the evolution of black holes can be linked to the evolution of the largest galaxies in the Universe.

“Big black holes formed via these supermassive stars could have had a huge impact on the evolution of the universe, including galaxy formation,” explains study researcher Mitchell Begelman,quoted by Daily Galaxy.

The expert holds an appointment as a professor and the chair of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB). He explains that the supermassive stars started forming just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, some 13.75 billion years ago.

These behemoth objects may have reached as much as tens of millions of solar masses. Due to their inherent instability, these objects would have only endured for a few million years, before finally exploding during enormous supernova events.

Details of the new investigation into the nature of the first supermassive black holes will appear in a new scientific paper, to be published in an upcoming issue of the esteemed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“What's new here is we think we have found a new mechanism to form these giant supermassive stars, which gives us a new way of understanding how big black holes may have formed relatively fast,” Begelman explains.

The expert believes that the enormous stars may have remained stable using mechanisms that modern astronomy  has not yet contemplated.

“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. This new model of black hole development indicates a possible alternate route to their formation,” the researcher concludes.