NASA's Chandra Reveals Supermassive Black Holes Gobble More Matter Than Expected

A certain group of unusual giant black holes may be consuming excessive amounts of matter. Scientists have discovered that supermassive black holes could be gobbling down far more matter than first expected.

Astronomers have known for a while that supermassive black holes, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and residing in the centers of galaxies, can gobble up huge quantities of gas and dust that have fallen into their gravitational pull. As the matter falls toward these black holes, it glows with such brilliance that they can be seen billions of light-years away.

Called quasars, these supermassive black holes may be more adept at devouring materials than researchers once thought. The researchers examined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory for 51 quasars located between 5 billion and 11.5 billion light-years from Earth. These quasars had unusually weak emission from certain atoms, especially carbon, at ultraviolet wavelengths.

The weak ultraviolet atomic emission and X-ray fluxes from these objects could be an important clue to the question of how a supermassive black hole pulls in matter. Computer simulations show that, at low inflow rates, matter swirls toward the black hole in a thin disk. However, if the rate of inflow is high, the disk can puff up dramatically into a torus or doughnut that surrounds the inner part of the disk.

"This picture fits with our data," said Jianfeng Wu, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If a quasar is embedded in a thick doughnut-shaped structure of gas and dust, the doughnut with absorb much of the radiation produced closer to the black hole and prevent it from striking gas located further out, resulting in weaker ultraviolet atomic emission and X-ray emission."

The implication for these latest findings is that these "thick-disk" quasars may harbor black holes growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate. The current study and previous ones by different teams suggest that these quasars might have been more common in the early universe, only about a billion years after the Big Bang. This rapid growth may also explain about the existence of huge black holes at earlier times.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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