The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed has been solved by a team of astrophysicists.
The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by black holes less than a billion years after the Big bang was one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics.
The first quasars were formed in the violent, turbulent conditions of rare gas in the early universe.
The discovery overturns 20 years of thought on the origin of the first black holes in the universe.
Black holes can be millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. In 2003 we found quasars that were similar to lighthouses in the early universe. They didn't understand how they formed.
Early quasars can form at the junctions of rare, cold, powerful streams of gas. The black hole had to be 100,000 solar mass at birth to exist in a volume of space a billion light years across. Black holes are formed when stars run out of fuel and collapse.
The first quasars had no resemblance to the turbulent clouds in which the first solar-mass stars formed.
Dr. Whalen said that the stars were huge and primitive. They lived for just a quarter of a million years before they died.
The cold, dense streams of gas capable of growing a billion solar-mass black hole in just a few hundred million years were found by our computer models. The cold streams caused turbulence in the cloud that prevented normal stars from forming until the cloud became so large it collapsed under its own weight, forming two giant primordial stars.
When the first stars in the universe formed, they also created their own massive seeds. The result explains the origin of the first quasars as well as their numbers at an early age.
The first black holes were the result of structure formation in dark matter.
The paper was published in Nature.
More information: Daniel Whalen, Turbulent cold flows gave birth to the first quasars, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04813-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04813-y Journal information: Nature
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