Quasars and Direct collapse black holes.

 

Image taken fron pixabay.

Some of the most distant objects discovered till now, powered by super massive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, quasars (or quasi-stellar objects) are some of the brightest objects in the known universe. Quasars are generally found in galactic centers with highly dense clouds of gas and dust and these are extremely luminous active galactic nuclei. Black holes appear black because even light cannot escape it's gravitational pull. When matter from these clouds is sucked into the black hole some particles are flung outwards at high speeds (nearly the speed of light) and these jets can be seen above and below it. Due to this, they are among the brightest objects known to us.

Credits: NASA, ESA, and X. Fan (University of Arizona)

But there is another mystery at the heart of this. As they are also one of the most distant objects it means that they are among the oldest objects too.The quasar J0439+1634, shown above, is 12.8 billion light years away from us. This means it appears to us as it was 12.8 billion years ago, when the universe was just about 1 billion years old. To get so massive it must have formed when the universe was very young.

We know that one way that black holes form is when massive stars collapse after running out of fuel. But in the above case this does not seem possible as this happened relatively soon after the big bang and there was just not enough time for such massive stars to form and collapse to become black holes. One theory is that these black holes formed simply due to the accumulation of large clouds of gas. The name given to these objects is "Direct collapse black holes". In the early universe conditions could have been suitable for these objects and the oldest super massive black holes may have formed like this.

Credits: NASA, ESA, and C. Kochanek (OSU)

For now this may be theoretical but there is evidence of direct collapsing black holes. The above images show that the star N6946-BH1 simply vanishes, without going supernova. It is visible in the left image, taken in 2007, and is gone in the right image, taken in 2015. A star that was 25 times the mass of our son simply vanished. This was the first time a star was observed to collapse and become a black hole without going supernova. The team conducting the study also thinks that this might be the reason why astronomers rarely see massive stars go supernova. Many massive stars may simply be becoming black holes without any explosion.

This means that black holes can form in different ways and who knows what we might discover about them in the coming future.

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