The very structure of the Universe promotes their growth

Dec 13, 2011 15:55 GMT  ·  By
The large-scale cosmological mass distribution patterns favors the development of supermassive black holes at gas knots
   The large-scale cosmological mass distribution patterns favors the development of supermassive black holes at gas knots

A quick look at the large-scale distribution patterns of matter in the Universe will reveal the existence of what astronomers plastically refer to as the cosmic web.

It is made up of thick tendrils of gas that come together at node, and apparently this is where supermassive black holes prefer to develop.

This actually makes a lot of sense, since these are the most likely locations in the Universe to contain the vast amounts of gas needed to feed one of these dark behemoths until it reaches masses more than 10 billion times that of the Sun.

The new proposal was extracted from simulation data presented by a new computer model. What the simulation indicates is that cold gas can fall through the event horizon of a black hole directly, without first being mashed together into an accretion disk, LiveScience reports.

Experts at the Carnegie Mellon University, who led the research, say that the model data fit observations of ancient, supermassive black holes in the early Universe, and that this is “a success story for the modern theory of cosmology.”