Article by: Andacs Robert Eugen, on 08 July 2022, at 10:26 am Los Angeles time

A team of scientists composed of astronomers and astrophysicists has most likely solved one of the greatest mysteries of astronomy.

It is believed that quasars are powered by supermassive black holes (approx. 40 observed so far), and the first quasars would have formed somewhere approx. 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Well, the team of scientists led by Dr. Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth found that the first quasars formed in a natural and quite violent way as the early universe was, through the turbulence of rare gas tanks.

Dr. Daniel Whalen and his team did both new research and used simulations from the supercomputers of the past that showed that early quasars formed at the junctions of rare, cold, and strong gas flows.

Also, the team of researchers said about the study that in a space of approx. a billion light-years there were extremely few quasars, but they must have had a mass of 100,000 solar masses when they were born.

Such a large mass is very difficult to explain, because opponents in this regard are probably the early stars that had between 10,000 and 100,000 solar masses, but which formed in exotic environments, finely tuned among which are strong ultraviolet backgrounds or supersonic fluxes between gas and dark matter.

However, these stars formed in a completely different way than the first quasars that formed in turbulent clouds.

The research team said the following

"We think of these stars as a bit like dinosaurs on earth, they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years before collapsing to black holes."

"This discovery is fascinating because it has overturned 20 years of thought on the origin of the first supermassive black holes in the universe."

"We find supermassive black holes at the centers of most massive galaxies today, which can be millions or billions of times the sun's mass. But in 2003, we began finding quasars - highly luminous, actively-accreting supermassive black holes like cosmic lighthouses in the early universe - that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. And no one understood how they formed by such early times."

"We think of these stars as a bit like dinosaurs on earth, they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years before collapsing to black holes."

"Our supercomputer models returned to very early times and found that the cold, dense streams of gas capable of growing a billion solar-mass black holes in just a few hundred million years created their supermassive stars without need for unusual environments. The cold streams drove turbulence in the cloud that prevented normal stars from forming until the cloud became so massive that it collapsed catastrophically under its weight, forming two gigantic primordial stars - one of 30,000 solar masses and another of 40,000."

"Consequently, the only primordial clouds that could form a quasar just after cosmic dawn -when the first stars in the universe formed - also conveniently created their massive seeds. This simple, beautiful result explains not only the origin of the first quasars but also their demographics - their numbers at early times."

"The first supermassive black holes were simply a natural consequence of structure formation in cold dark matter cosmologies - children of the cosmic web."

Source: Nature