How did supermassive black holes form in the early epochs of the universe? More importantly, how did they have enough time to grow as large as they did? The answer requires a very different universe. And back then, conditions were much different than they are now. There was a lot of gas, little dust, no stars, and a plethora of dark matter. Astronomers have spent decades observing early quasars, massive active galaxies powered by huge black holes feeding on surrounding gas. But these galaxies are seen so early in the universe’s history, one starts to wonder how a black hole finds sufficient...
In the early Universe, things were quite different. The first stars were much more massive than stars today, and contained mostly Hydrogen. Astronomers have good ideas about how they formed, but other objects from around this time, namely black holes, are much tougher to account for. Early black holes were huge, with no explanation for how they grew so large. “Early” means “first Billion years after the Big Bang,” but even in that time, it’s hard to determine how observed black holes could grow as large as 100,000 solar masses. I say 100,000 solar masses, because that is the mass of two ‘seed’ black holes, discovered...
Where do the heavy elements on the periodic table come from? The general answer is from what’s called the r-process of stellar nucleosynthesis. This translates to ‘rapid neutron capture’ being the method by which most of the elements heavier than Iron are formed on the periodic table. This process requires immense energy and was originally thought to only occur within core-collapse supernova explosions. “Understanding how heavy, r-process elements are formed is one of hardest problems in nuclear physics,” said Anna Frebel, assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and also a member of...
When you think of a nebula forming stars, it’s hard to imagine how large it is. Most nebulae form hundreds or even thousands of stars before being blown away by the young stellar winds. Pockets of a nebula collapse into dense regions that will eventually become stars with surrounding planetary systems. There are places in the galaxy we can look and actually see it happening. Pictured above, the beautiful ‘running chicken’ nebula, as strangely named as it is, is in the later stages of it’s star forming life. Many bright young stars have formed and their intense radiation is now...
We just saw it. Another record breaker. This incredible explosion of a massive dying star is the brightest supernova ever observed. You may think you get how big this explosion was, but it was brighter than collective brightness of all the 400 Billion stars in the Milky Way. You may be asking why you can’t see it in the sky. Well even though it is incredibly bright, it is 3.8 Billion light years away in a distant galaxy, so the discovery needed a huge telescope. It may have been powered by a rare star called a magnetar, a star with such an...
