Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2016

SPACE CHRONICLES Hubble finds clues to the birth of super- massive black holes F or years astrono- mers have debated how the earliest gen- eration of supermassive black holes formed very quickly, relatively speak- ing, after the Big Bang. Now, an Italian team has identified two objects in the early Universe that seem to be the origin of these early supermassive black holes. The two objects repre- sent the most promising black hole seed candi- dates found so far. Su- permassive black holes contain millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. In the mod- ern Universe they can be found in the centre of nearly all large galaxies, including the Milky Way. The supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way has a mass of four million solar masses. The two black hole seed candidates would also be the progenitors of two of the modern supermassive black holes. The group used computer models and applied a new analysis method to data from the NASA Chandra X- by NASA T his artist’s impression shows a possible seed for the formation of a supermassive black hole. Two of these possible seeds were discovered by an Italian team, using three space telescopes: the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. [NASA/CXC/M. Weiss] ray Observatory, the NASA/ESA Hub- ble Space Telescope, and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope to find and identify the two objects. Both of these newly discovered black hole seed candidates are seen less than a billion years after the Big Bang and have an initial mass of about 100000 times the Sun. “Our discov- ery, if confirmed, would explain how these monster black holes were born,” said Fabio Pacucci, lead au- thor of the study, of Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. This new result helps to explain why we see supermassive black holes less than one billion years after the Big Bang. There are two main theories to explain the formation of super- massive black holes in the early Uni-