CrazyNeutrino said:
Astronomers find evidence for ‘direct collapse’ black hole
Astronomers Aaron Smith and Volker Bromm of The University of Texas at Austin, working with Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have discovered evidence for an unusual kind of black hole born extremely early in the universe. They showed that a recently discovered unusual source of intense radiation is likely powered by a “direct-collapse black hole,” a type of object predicted by theorists more than a decade ago. Their work is published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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“Astronomers think they know how supermassive black holes weighing in at millions of suns grow in the heart of most galaxies in our present epoch. They get started from a “seed” black hole, created when an extremely massive star collapses. This seed black hole has the mass of about 100 suns. … Star formation is the enemy of forming massive black holes. Stars produce feedback that blows away the surrounding gas cloud. For decades, astronomers have called this conundrum the quasar seed problem. The accretion theory does not explain supermassive black holes in extremely distant – and therefore young – quasars.”
Interesting.
“The theory we proposed when Bromm was my postdoc (at Harvard) suggested that the conditions in the first generation of galaxies were different. Instead of making many normal stars, these galaxies formed a single supermassive star at their centre.”
The problem with that is angular momentum. Angular momentum cannot be created or destroyed, so any massive cloud of gas or dark matter or whatever cannot collapse because angular momentum would tear it apart.
Any yet, Bromm’s theory may still be correct, if there is a simple physical mechanism that uses this tearing apart to separate out the high angular momentum parts of the gas cloud from the low angular momentum parts. In which case perhaps the low angular momentum parts could collapse into a single supermassive star. I’d need to look closely into the details to get a better understanding of how this could or could-not happen.