Several observatories are already enabling us to probe black holes in the early universe with great detail. The seed black holes would need to draw in matter at a rate of at least 0.1 solar masses per year, for example, and at the moment it is not clear if this is possible. Large amounts of material made of hydrogen and helium would be needed to form enough massive seed black holes to produce supermassive black holes, which appears to have been possible.īut other unexplained factors mean this is still an open question. However, it requires conditions in the early universe to have been just right for these black holes to form. ‘We found this method is basically feasible,’ said Dr Latif, explaining that these initial seed black holes are large enough to account for the growth of supermassive black holes of a billion solar masses in a small time frame. His project, which was carried out at CNRS in France, showed that supermassive stars could produce seed black holes hundreds of thousands of times the mass of our sun. 'It’s like going to kindergarten and finding a seven-feet tall baby.' Dr Muhammad Latif, United Arab Emirates University Dr Latif was the principal investigator for the FIRSTBHs project which, like SmartStars, investigated the plausibility of the supermassive star model, using simulations on a supercomputer in France. Other theories for how these black holes grew so quickly are that a tiny fraction of black holes grew at incredible rates, or that smaller black holes merged together to grow into a supermassive black hole.ĭr Muhammad Latif, an astrophysicist at United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi, agrees with Dr Regan that the supermassive star model remains our best theory at the moment. ‘Over the next generation of supercomputers we’ll be able to bring those simulations further and further along.’ ‘It’s a really excellent starting point,’ said Dr Regan. The researchers were only able to model the future of such stars for a million years, but the modelling needs to cover 800 million years to see if these stars really could be the seeds of supermassive black holes. However, even supercomputers have their limitations. They found such stars could grow up to 250,000 times the mass of the sun within 200 million years of the Big Bang – a tantalising result. The team wanted to see if these stars could account for the rapid growth of supermassive black holes, which we see at the centre of nearly every galaxy today.

Scientists are now investigating whether supermassive black holes could have formed from supermassive stars which collapsed to form large ‘seed’ black holes, giving them a head start in their growth.ĭr Regan coordinated a project called SmartStars, which used one of the most powerful supercomputers in Ireland, ICHEC, to model how supergiant stars might provide the seeds for supermassive black holes. If the mass of the star was large enough, it will collapse into an object with an immense gravitational pull from which nothing, not even light, can escape – a black hole.Īs the black hole gradually draws in more and more nearby dust and gas it can grow in size, eventually reaching the gigantic proportions of a supermassive black hole, such as the first one ever imaged in April 2019. Once a star has no fuel left to burn, it can no longer support its mass and collapses. ‘That is still a huge problem in astrophysics,’ said Dr John Regan, an astrophysicist from Dublin City University, Ireland.īlack holes form after a massive star runs out of fuel, sometimes resulting from a supernova and other times without a supernova, which is called the direct collapse scenario.

And while several theories for this rapid early black hole growth have been proposed, the answer remains elusive. Our current understanding suggests that in this time frame, only so-called intermediate mass black holes up to 100,000 times the mass of our Sun should have been able to grow. This is a problem that has long plagued astronomers.

Formation of blackhole