Using supercomputers to simulate ancient galaxy mergers, an Ohio State researcher has made a discovery: Intergalactic traffic collisions some 13 billion years ago gave rise to the universe’s first super-massive black holes.
Intergalactic traffic collisions some 13 billion years ago gave rise to the universe's first super-massive black holes – and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors.
That's what a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics discovered, when he simulated ancient galaxy mergers on supercomputers.
The discovery fills in a missing chapter of our universe's early history, and could help write the next chapter--in which scientists better understand how gravity and dark matter formed the universe as we know it.
In the journal Nature, Stelios Kazantzidis and colleagues describe computer simulations in which they modeled the evolution of galaxies and black holes during the first few billion years after the Big Bang.
Our universe is thought to be 14 billion years old. Other astronomers recently determined that big galaxies formed much earlier in the universe’s history than previously thought--within the first 1 billion years, Kazantzidis explained.
These new computer simulations show that the first-ever super-massive black holes were likely born when those early galaxies collided and merged together.
"Our results add a new milestone to the important realization of how structure forms in the universe," he said.
The galaxies that formed those first super-massive black holes are still around, Kazantzidis added.
"One of them is likely our neighbor in the Virgo Cluster, the elliptical galaxy M87," he said. "The galaxies we saw in our simulation would be the biggest galaxies known today, about 100 times the size of the Milky Way. M87 fits that description."
He and his cohorts also hope that their work will aid astronomers who are searching the skies for direct evidence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity: gravitational waves.
According to general relativity, any ancient galaxy mergers would have created massive gravitational waves--ripples in the space-time continuum--the remnants of which should still be visible today.
