Some supermassive quasars formed within the first billion years after the Big Bang. Now, scientists know why.
The most distant quasar ever found is hiding a seriously supermassive black hole
Using a computer simulation, researchers modeled star formation in the early universe, focusing on one of the rare junctures where two streams of cold, turbulent gas met.
"The cold streams drove turbulence in the [gas] cloud that prevented normal stars from forming until the cloud became so massive it collapsed catastrophically under its own weight, forming two gigantic primordial stars," study co-author Daniel Whalen, a senior lecturer in cosmology at the University of Portsmouth in England, said in aPrevious studies estimated that a quasar must measure anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses at its birth.
In fact, it's feasible that both large stars could have collapsed into black holes almost instantly and then continued to gobble up gas as they grew into supermassive quasars like the ones scientists have detected in the early universe. As the monster black holes continue to grow, they could even merge, releasing a torrent of space-time ripples known as
, the researchers wrote. It's possible that scientists could even detect these waves using special observatories in the coming decades, potentially confirming the results of the simulation.
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