MADRID, 13 (EUROPA PRESS)
A new theoretical study by astrophysicist Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia proposes a new framework for the birth of supermassive black holes: the first stars.
These mysterious behemoths lurk at the centers of most major galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and are often millions or even billions of times more massive than the Sun. Their formation has been the subject of intense debate, especially since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered numerous such black holes existing in distant places, dating back to times as far back as the dawn of the universe.
Tan's theory, known as "Population III.1," proposes that all supermassive black holes form from the remnants of the earliest stars, the so-called "Population III.1" stars, the first stars in the universe that grew to enormous sizes under the influence of the energy from a process known as dark matter annihilation. This theory has predicted many of the recent findings of the JWST.
In his paper, published on the preprint server arXiv and forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Tan describes another prediction of the theory that could shed new light on the origins of the universe.
"Our model requires that supermassive progenitor stars of black holes rapidly ionized hydrogen gas in the universe, announcing their birth with bright flashes that filled all of space," Tan said in a statement.
Interestingly, this additional phase of ionization, which occurs much earlier than in normal galaxies, could help resolve some recent puzzles and tensions that have arisen in cosmology, such as the 'Hubble Tension', 'Dynamic Dark Energy', and the preference for 'Negative Neutrino Masses', all of which challenge the standard model of the universe.
It's a connection that wasn't anticipated when developing the Pop III.1 model, but it could prove to be extremely important.
EXTERNAL PRAISE
The study has been praised by Richard Ellis, one of the world's leading observational cosmologists and professor of astrophysics at University College London, who has devoted decades to studying the formation of the first galaxies and the first light of the universe.
"Professor Tan has developed an elegant model that could explain a two-stage process: star birth and ionization in the early universe," Ellis said. "It's possible that the first stars formed in a brief, bright flash, then disappeared, meaning that what we're now seeing with the James Webb Telescope could just be the second wave. The universe, it seems, still holds surprises."
