Discovered dozens of the largest in the Universe black holes

2018-02-21 15:51

Discovered dozens of the largest in the Universe black holes
“Ultramassive” black holes with masses of tens of billions of suns can meet in the Universe more often than you think.

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In the active centers of large galaxies, our milky Way to the distant and unreachable clusters are supermassive black holes. Absorbing gas clouds and stars, merging with other black holes, they can gain weight in many tens of billions of solar masses, affecting growth and the evolution of their galaxies. However, such “ultramassive” the giants need a lot of time on the growth, and in the modern Universe, they are rare, reports Rus.Media.

The current record holder is a quasar S5 0014+81 is in the constellation of Cepheus – can reach 40 billion solar masses. But most known of supermassive black holes measured in orders from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of suns.

However, the new work of an international group of astrophysicists indicates that we may significantly underestimate the prevalence of “ultramassive” of black holes. Professor, University of Montreal Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo (Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo) and her colleagues studied 72 galaxy, located in the most vibrant and large clusters at the distance of 3.5 billion light years. The researchers compared their weight with the masses of supermassive black holes at their centers. The results presented in the article published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and presented at the preprints arXiv.org.

Observations of the space telescope Chandra have allowed to register the x-ray emission of accretion disks of matter and on this basis to estimate the mass of the black holes. Luminosity of galaxies in the radio band allowed us to estimate their mass and compare the resulting numbers. As you might expect, the bigger the galaxy the bigger the black hole at its center, but the overall growth in the size of black holes is faster than galaxies.

The dependence of the sizes of galaxies and their supermassive black holes turned out to be non-linear, and black holes in the largest of them – much more difficult than expected. So, about 40 percent are considered scientists of the galaxies contained “ultramassive” black holes with masses of 10 billion suns and more.

To explain the amazing speed of their growth. Perhaps they were beginning to form under ideal conditions, and grew faster than expected. And perhaps we lose something important in understanding the growth mechanisms of supermassive black holes.