Supersonic gas streams left over from the Big Bang drive massive black hole formation

An international team of researchers has successfully used a super-computer simulation to recreate the formation of a massive black hole from supersonic gas streams left over from the Big Bang. Their study, published in the journal Science, shows this black hole could be the source of the birth and development of the largest and oldest super-massive black holes recorded in our Universe.

Projected density distributions of dark matter (background and top panel) and gas (bottom three panels) components when 
the massive star forms. The stellar cradle is extremely assymmetry as a wide wedge-shaped structure (middle panel) due 
to the initial supersonic gas motions left over from the Big Bang. The circle in the right panel indicates the 
gravitationally unstable region with mass of 26,000 solar-masses [Credit: Shingo Hirano]

"This is significant progress. The origin of the monstrous black holes has been a long-standing mystery and now we have a solution to it," said author and Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Principal Investigator Naoki Yoshida.

Recent discoveries of these super-massive black holes located 13 billion light years away, corresponding to when the universe was just five per cent of its present age, pose a serious challenge to the theory of black hole formation and evolution. The physical mechanisms that form black holes and drive their growth are poorly understood.