Dark matter could have contributed to the formation of giant black holes in the early Universe, Canadian scientists suggested based on the results of a new study. This assumption helps explain how giant black holes formed even before the first stars appeared, reports UNN with reference to Space.com.
Details
Expanding the spectrum of deep space observations with the Webb Space Telescope helps to detect giant black holes that appeared in the relatively young Universe. Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was home to black holes billions of times more massive than the Sun.
The only known way to create black holes is the death of massive stars, but this process yields black holes with a few dozen solar masses, i.e., small ones. The problem with the early appearance of giant black holes is that at that point there was not enough time for the first stars to appear and die, and then for these small black holes to consume enough material to reach supermassive status.
In a new paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint database in March, scientist Hao Jiao from McGill University (Quebec) and his colleagues propose an unconventional view to answer these questions: dark matter.
So, according to scientists' assumption, perhaps there was some other way to create large black holes in the early Universe, which gave impetus to this process. The simplest way to do this is to take large clouds of hydrogen and helium and make them collapse, leading to the formation of a black hole.
Addition
But clouds of gas during collapse tend to form molecular hydrogen, which cools the gas very efficiently. Instead of leading to collapse into a hole, this causes the cloud to fragment into many smaller pieces, forming clusters of nascent stars and preventing direct collapse into a black hole. One way to avoid the formation of molecular hydrogen is to irradiate it with high-energy ultraviolet light, which was lacking in the early Universe because stars had not yet formed.
Some dark matter models predict that it is extremely light, even billions of times lighter than a neutrino, the lightest known particle. If dark matter is superlight, then on galactic scales it acts more like a quantum ocean than a hive of discrete particles.
As a reminder
ESA recorded the awakening of a black hole in the galaxy SDSS1335+0728 at a distance of 300 million light-years. It suddenly began emitting powerful X-rays.