Scientists have studied an amazing object called “Infinity,” which is a pair of colliding galaxies. Inside them, they saw a supermassive black hole that formed in a clearly unusual way.
Infinity galaxy
Astronomers from Yale University have studied an amazing object they have named “Infinity,” which is actually a pair of galaxies that we see at the moment of collision. They reported their observations in a publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The main result of the study was the discovery of a gas cloud in the center of a newborn galaxy and a supermassive black hole inside it. This is a very interesting result, given that the pair of galaxies discovered is very far away from us, which means that we see it as it was in the early days of the universe.
However, the black hole at the center of infinity turned out to be even more interesting than one might think. The fact is that the two centers of the colliding galaxies are still very far apart. And the newborn black hole does not coincide with either of them.
New mechanism for the formation of black holes
Scientists believe that in this case, they may be dealing with a new mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes. We are talking about their direct birth from huge clouds of gas, which, as a result of certain forces, are instantly compressed into compact objects.
The existence of such an assumption is an alternative to the standard “light seed” theory. The latter suggests that there is only one mechanism for the formation of black holes in space — through supernova explosions. However, this theory cannot explain the existence of very massive objects in the very early Universe that scientists observe.
All this could explain the “heavy seeds” with masses of thousands and tens of thousands of solar masses, but scientists have never seen anything like this before and have very little idea of the mechanism behind the formation of such objects.
And now, scientists have actually witnessed the birth of one of them with their own eyes. According to researchers, this occurred as a result of the collision of two shock waves, which created an overpressure zone in which the black hole was born.
According to phys.org
