Black holes in the early Universe appear to have grown far faster than scientists once believed.
Astronomers have long struggled to explain how black holes became enormous so early in the Universe’s history. Observations show that some reached supermassive proportions in a cosmic blink of an eye, leaving scientists searching for a mechanism powerful enough to drive such rapid growth. New research from Ireland’s Maynooth University , published in Nature Astronomy, offers a compelling explanation.
The study suggests that the early Universe was far more violent and unpredictable than previously assumed. In this turbulent setting, small black holes formed shortly after the Big Bang were surrounded by vast amounts of dense gas, allowing them to grow at extraordinary speeds.
“We found that the chaotic conditions that existed in the early Universe triggered early, smaller black holes to grow into the super-massive black holes we see later following a feeding frenzy which devoured material all around them,” says Daxal Mehta, a PhD candidate in Maynooth University’s Department of Physics, who led the research.
To test this idea, the team relied on detailed computer simulations capable of tracking how matter behaved around young black holes in the first few hundred million years of cosmic time.
“We revealed, using state-of-the-art computer simulations, that the first generation of black holes – those born just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – grew incredibly fast, into tens of thousands of times the size of our Sun.”
