Lewis Andrews

Seeds of SMBHS opens windows to the early cosmos to one of the theoretical origins of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH). Around 0.1-0.5 Billion years after the Big Bang, it is theorised that certain stars could reach up to 10 million solar masses. For comparison some of the most massive stars today will have in or around 300 solar masses. The early universe however was much denser and hotter. As a result, larger stars formed from Hydrogen clouds, which were immensely larger than they are today in star formation.

 

When one of these stars formed the mass and pressure were too much to maintain a balance and the core within the star collapsed into a black hole. However, due to the violent ‘force feeding’ of the black hole at the core from the surrounding mass, the star didn't go supernova like it would today. Instead, a dangerous balance emerged from the star’s mass crushing in and the black hole’s radiation pressure pushing out. Over a few million years, the star would have been effectively ‘eaten’ from the inside out. As the black hole grew, this caused the star to heat up and expand. It may have reached a width of 30x the solar system. Strong magnetic fields would have spewed out of the star's poles two jets of plasma into deep space as the black hole consumed the star from the inside. Eventually, the accretion disk surrounding the black hole will have become too powerful and the expanded star too stretched resulting in the black hole destroying its host and blowing it apart.

 

This theory has the potential to answer the very important question within astronomy of how Supermassive Black Holes at the centres of galaxies exist. Some of the SMBHS we see within the centre of galaxies are too large for the current age of the universe. The black holes born from supernovas will only be a few tens of solar masses. The merging of black holes will only produce black holes with more than 100 solar masses. It would then take billions of years to make black holes with hundreds of thousands of solar masses. However, there is evidence of black holes having around 800 million solar masses only 700 million years after the Big Bang. Quite a difference. If black hole stars existed then they could be a highly accelerated shortcut to the SMBHS we see today in the centre of galaxies. These would then seed the early galaxy formations all the while drawing in other black holes to merge with and accumulating more mass to build up to SMBHS we see today.