27.3 Quasars as probes of evolution in the universe  (Page 6/20)

The challenge is growing these smaller black holes quickly enough to make the much larger black holes we see a few hundred million years later. It turns out to be difficult because there are limits on how fast they can accrete matter. These should make sense to you from what we discussed earlier in the chapter. If the rate of accretion becomes too high, then the energy streaming outward from the black hole’s accretion disk will become so strong as to blow away the infalling matter.

What if, instead, a collapsing gas cloud doesn’t form a black hole directly or break up and form a group of regular stars, but stays together and makes one fairly massive star embedded within a dense cluster of thousands of lower mass stars and large quantities of dense gas? The massive star will have a short lifetime and will soon collapse to become a black hole. It can then begin to attract the dense gas surrounding it. But calculations show that the gravitational attraction of the many nearby stars will cause the black hole to zigzag randomly within the cluster and will prevent the formation of an accretion disk. If there is no accretion disk, then matter can fall freely into the black hole from all directions. Calculations suggest that under these conditions, a black hole even as small as 10 times the mass of the Sun could grow to more than 10 billion times the mass of the Sun by the time the universe is a billion years old.

Scientists are exploring other ideas for how to form the seeds of supermassive black hole    s, and this remains a very active field of research. Whatever mechanism caused the rapid formation of these supermassive black holes, they do give us a way to observe the youthful universe when it was only about five percent as old as it is now.

Key concepts and summary

Quasars and galaxies affect each other: the galaxy supplies fuel to the black hole, and the quasar heats and disrupts the gas clouds in the galaxy. The balance between these two processes probably helps explain why the black hole seems always to be about 1/200 the mass of the spherical bulge of stars that surrounds the black hole.

Quasars were much more common billions of years ago than they are now, and astronomers speculate that they mark an early stage in the formation of galaxies. Quasars were more likely to be active when the universe was young and fuel for their accretion disk was more available.

Quasar activity can be re-triggered by a collision between two galaxies, which provides a new source of fuel to feed the black hole.

For further exploration

Articles

Bartusiak, M. “A Beast in the Core.” Astronomy (July 1998): 42. On supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

Disney, M. “A New Look at Quasars.” Scientific American (June 1998): 52.

Djorgovski, S. “Fires at Cosmic Dawn.” Astronomy (September 1995): 36. On quasars and what we can learn from them.

Ford, H.,&Tsvetanov, Z. “Massive Black Holes at the Hearts of Galaxies.” Sky&Telescope (June 1996): 28. Nice overview.