Entire infant galaxy becomes a big black hole

• Autores: Lisa Grossman
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2921, 2013, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Exploding protogalaxies may explain how supermassive black holes came to exist just a few hundred million years after the big bang. Daniel Whalen of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues ran simulations of protogalaxies--clouds of atomic hydrogen that started out too hot to form stars. Most of the modeled protogalaxies cooled down as expected, and dense pockets of gas collapsed to make stars. But some protogalaxies were bathed in ultraviolet radiation from the newborn stars of neighboring galaxies, and so they could not cool off. They instead became clouds of hot gas 100 million times the mass of the sun as they pulled more hydrogen from their surroundings. At that mass, in-falling hydrogen atoms collided so violently that electrons were bumped into higher energy states. When the electrons returned to their original states, they emitted energy, finally allowing the protogalaxy to cool.