14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists were recently able to gain more insight into how the overall shape, size and behavior of galaxies is modeled, when they were able to simulate how dark matter behaves around black holes.
This is a very important study, given that this type of interactions occurred a lot in the earliest days of the Universe, when only a fraction of the stars and galaxies we see today were available.
At this point, experts are suggesting that it was build-ups of dark matter that allowed the massive clouds of hydrogen gas permeating the Universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang to come together and create the first stars.
At that time, long before the reionization epoch ended (some 1 billion years after the Cosmos was born), dark matter accumulations provided so-called concentration nuclei for the gas and dust that would go on to create the first stars.
Critically important for how the Universe and the galaxies within evolved beyond that time were the interactions that appeared between black holes at the center of emerging galaxies and dark matter.
The new study delivers some fresh insight into that, showing how they interacted in the areas immediately adjacent to a black hole's event horizon. The work was conducted at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Daily Galaxy reports.
One of the most interesting things the researchers learned was that the rate at which dark matter got absorbed through the event horizon was directly proportional to its concentrations around the object.
If those levels exceeded a threshold of seven solar masses per cubic light-year, then the black hole consumed vast amounts of the stuff, and grew incredibly fast, influencing the overall appearance of the galaxies hosting them at the same time.
Given that this process happened with each and every black hole in the Universe since it appeared, it can be argued that the interactions between these objects and dark matter shaped the Cosmos.
This is also the opinion of UNAM astronomers Dr. Xavier Hernandez and Dr. William Lee, the experts who conducted the new investigation, and who modeled the interactions.
“Over the billions of years since galaxies formed, such runaway absorption of dark matter in black holes would have altered the population of galaxies away from what we actually observe,” Hernandez explains.