Tag: solar masses

Seeding The Supermassive

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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...

Dense Cluster in a Dense Starfield

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One of the largest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy is the Arches cluster, and its easy to see why.  Lying only 100 light years away from the supermassive black hole that lies in the heart of our galaxy, it formed in an incredibly dense environment. It lies 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, and contains thousands of massive stars, including 160 that are hot, young, and exceptionally more massive than the Sun. Only 1 in 10 Million stars in the galaxy are as bright as these massive central 160 stars.   Though it is...