2023-06-26 04:00:04
The colossal mass of supermassive black holes, those giants at the heart of large galaxies, is an enigma. Joseph Simon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has dedicated his career to studying these cosmic monsters.
Illustration of a supermassive black hole emitting a stream of energetic particles.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The black hole at the center of our galaxy (Galaxies is a quarterly French magazine devoted to science fiction. With…), Sagittarius A*, is more than 4 million times more massive (The word massive can be used as: ) that the Sun (The Sun (Sol in Latin, Helios or Ήλιος in Greek) is the star…). There are even larger black holes in the centers of other galaxies, billions of times more massive than our Sun. Through computer simulations, Joseph Simon sought to predict the distribution and mass (The term mass is used to designate two quantities attached to one…) of the largest black holes in the Universe (The Universe is the set of all that exists and the laws that govern it.), a mathematical notion known as the “black hole mass function”.
The results suggest that these giants were certainly much more massive than thought billions of years ago. This finding might help elucidate the forces that shaped objects like Sagittarius A* as they grew from small black holes to giants.
Joseph Simon is also part of the NANOGrav project (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves), which seeks to detect gravitational waves (A wave is the propagation of a disturbance producing a reversible variation in its path…), these ripples of space-time (The notion of space-time was introduced at the beginning of the 1900s and resumed…) which cross the Universe permanently. These gravitational waves are generated among other things when two supermassive black holes meet and merge, literally distorting the fabric of the Universe.
To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to know the real mass of supermassive black holes. Indeed, more massive black holes produce larger gravitational waves. However, the measurement of the mass of black holes in distant galaxies remains unknown until now.
In his research, Joseph Simon used information on hundreds of thousands of galaxies, some dating back billions of years, to estimate the mass of their supermassive black hole. Using computer models, he simulated the impact of these masses on the gravitational wave background that these galaxies might create and in which we all live.
His results reveal a startling variety in the masses of supermassive black holes in the Universe dating back around 4 billion years. It also found a greater amount of large galaxies than some previous studies predicted. These results suggest that black holes may have grown faster than previously thought.
Joseph Simon now hopes to explore the full extent of black holes by going even further back in time.
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