Astronomers discovered how dark matter plays a role in forming early universe supermassive black holes. This information can help us to understand the evolution of our universe and the early days of the universe after the Big Bang.
Supermassive black holes are areas in space where a massive amount of gravitational force is present. There are three types of black holes: stellar-mass black holes, second types are supermassive black holes, and third are intermediate-mass black holes.
Supermassive black holes have masses millions or even billions of times that of our sun. Usually, all supermassive black holes are present at the heart of galaxies. But the question is, how did they form so quickly after the Big Bang? This question has puzzled astronomers for years.
Dark Matter’s Role
Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that can’t interact with any field. It doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light. It makes up about 27% of the universe. A recent study shows that dark matter might be the key to the formation of supermassive black holes. From the study, astronomers believed that the gravitational pull of dark matter helped to collect hydrogen gas into dense clouds. These collected dense clouds collapsed to form supermassive black holes.
NASA’s diamond-like top-notch observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), played an important role in this discovery. It has spotted supermassive black holes in the early universe. Black holes were discovered only 500 million years after the Big Bang. This is much earlier than previous studies showed.
Astrophysicists at UCLA have been studying these supermassive black holes. According to astrophysicists, if dark matter decays, it emits photons. Emitted photons keep hydrogen gas hot enough for gravity to gather it into dense clouds. In the absence of dark matter, dense clouds would cool, and maybe they formed stars instead of supermassive black holes.
Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, explained the significance and importance of this discovery. He said that finding such black holes whose mass was billions of times greater than our sun when the universe was just half a billion years old is surprising.
The formation of supermassive black holes is a critical process. It involves several stages. First, the death of massive stars creates stellar-mass black holes. These smaller black holes can merge and grow larger. Another possibility is the direct collapse of gas clouds into black holes. Dark matter’s role in this process is crucial. It prevents the gas clouds from cooling too quickly, allowing them to collapse into black holes.
This discovery also supports the existence of a type of dark matter that can decay into particles like photons. This type of dark matter could have been present in the early universe. Its decay would have provided the conditions for forming supermassive black holes.
The implications of this discovery are vast. It could help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe. It also sheds light on the nature of dark matter. Understanding dark matter is one of the biggest challenges in modern astrophysics. This discovery brings us one step closer to solving this mystery.
