2024-07-22 04:00:09
A leap forward in understanding the Universe. This is what the new simulation developed by a team of astrophysicists led by Caltech promises. For the first time, this simulation follows the journey of the primordial gas of theUniverse primitive until its integration into a disk d’accretion feeding a supermassive black holethus disrupting concepts established since the 1970s.
Credit: Caltech/Phil Hopkins group
Led by Phil Hopkins, professor of theoretical physics, this technological feat required years of work and the collaboration of two major projects: FIRE and STARFORGE. These projects focus on different scales, ranging from the formation of galaxies to that of individual stars, finally bridging a gap between these two phenomena.
Thanks to a resolution 1,000 times higher than that of previous simulations, the researchers discovered the predominant role of magnetic fields in the formation and structure of accretion disks around supermassive black holes. These fields, far from being anecdotal, play a central role in making these disks more “foamy” than expected.
The Open Journal of Astrophysics reports that these discs, initially supposed to be flat, are in reality supported by the pression magnetic, which far exceeds pressure thermal gas. This discovery calls into question many hypotheses about the massethe density and the dynamic of these discs.
Crédit: California Institute of Technology
The simulation uses a code called GIZMO, which can handle both large cosmic scales and microscopic details. By modulating the different physical components, the researchers were able to simulate a black hole 10 million times the mass of the Sun from the early Universe to the accretion of matter around this black hole.
This breakthrough opens up new research avenues: understanding in detail the merger of galaxies, the formation of stars in dense regions, and the characteristics of the first generations of stars. The implications are vast, offering avenues for exploring many still mysterious cosmic phenomena.
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