Super-Massive Black Hole Simulator - Video

When massive suns run out of fuel and collapse a stellar black hole forms. It has the power to crush objects the size of the Sun into a 75 mile wide object. 

Astronomers are studying how these black holes produce their highest-energy light. 

Credit: NASA / GSFC

Super-massive Black Holes Grow Surprisingly Fast

This image depicts three hot blobs of matter orbiting a black hole. 

If placed in our Solar System, this black hole would appear like a dark abyss spread out nearly as wide as Mercury's orbit.

The three blobs (each as large as the Sun) would be as far out as Jupiter. 

They orbit the black hole in a lightning-quick 20,000 miles per second, over a tenth of the speed of light.

CREDIT: NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital

Giant black holes are famous for their appetites, but these matter-munching monsters are even greedier than scientists once thought, a new study suggests.

The super-massive black holes that lurk at the center of most (if not all) galaxies are growing surprisingly quickly, the study found.

The result implies that these cosmic behemoths are sustained primarily by frequent small meals rather than rare and dramatic galactic mergers, as was previously believed.

Super-massive black holes are almost incomprehensibly huge, with some containing 10 billion or more times the mass of our own sun.

The research team used computer simulations to investigate how such black holes grow, especially in spiral galaxies like the Earth's Milky Way.

The astronomers found that, contrary to prevailing theory, central black holes can grow quite rapidly in quiet, merger-free spirals simply by sucking up galactic gas and other matter.

"These simulations show that it is no longer possible to argue that black holes in spiral galaxies do not grow efficiently," study lead author Victor Debattista, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement.

"Our simulations will allow us to refine our understanding of how black holes grew in different types of galaxies."

New Method: Measuring Super-Massive Black Holes

Understanding the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies is one of the most active research areas in astrophysics.

In a letter to Nature, an international team of astronomers, including Marc Sarzi from the University of Hertfordshire, report the exciting discovery of a new way to measure the mass of super-massive black holes in galaxies.

By measuring the speed with which carbon monoxide molecules orbit around such black holes, this new research opens the possibility of making these measurements in many more galaxies than ever before.

Supermassive black holes and galaxies
A black hole is an object so dense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.

Supermassive black holes can be as much as a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun, and it is believed that most, if not all galaxies including the Milky Way, contain supermassive black holes at their centres - suggesting that the evolution of black holes and galaxies is very tightly linked.

Understanding the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies is one of the most active research areas in astrophysics.

Intriguing link
Marc Sarzi, from the University of Hertfordshire's Centre for Astrophysics Research, said: "There is an intriguing link between the mass of supermassive black holes and the mass of their host galaxies, but this is based only on quite a small number of estimates.

Until now only three methods were used to measure the mass of supermassive black holes and these only work on relatively nearby galaxies.

With this new technique, we have been able to show that we can measure black hole masses much further out in the universe, which will help understanding the role that supermassive black holes played during the formation of galaxies."

Super-sharp telescope images
Tim Davis, lead author of the paper, from ESA's European Southern Observatory (ESO), commented:

"We observed carbon monoxide molecules in the galaxy we were monitoring using the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) telescope.

With its super-sharp images we were able to zoom right into the centre of the galaxy and observe the gas whizzing around the black hole. This gas moves at a speed which is determined by the black-hole's mass, and the distance from it. By measuring the velocity of the gas at each position, we can measure the mass of the black hole."

The CARMA observations were rather challenging, but the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope currently being built in Chile will allow this new technique to be applied more routinely to hundreds of galaxies in the nearby Universe.