Six galaxies trapped in the cosmic ‘Spider’s Web’ could explain why supermassive black holes exist


Why do supermassive black holes exist and how do they keep growing?  |  Image for presentation

Why do supermassive black holes exist and how do they keep growing? | Image for presentation

Mysterious black holes are thought to have formed from the first stellar fall, but astronomers are trying to figure out how they expanded into giants and became supermassive black holes.

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  • Last updated: October October 3, 2020, 4:56 PM IST
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Recent research can find out why supermassive black holes exist and continue to grow. Astronomers have discovered six galaxies trapped in the cosmic “spider’s web” of a supermassive black hole formed shortly after the Big Bang.

Mysterious black holes are thought to have formed from the first stellar fall, but astronomers are trying to figure out how they expanded into giants and became supermassive black holes.


The newly discovered black hole, discovered by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) – a universe that is not even billions of years old – has weighed 1 billion times the mass of our solar system.

Research published this month in the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics may help explain how supermassive black holes, such as the center of the galaxy, could evolve. Astronomers believe that filaments trapped in a mass of galaxies carry enough gas to feed a black hole, enabling it to grow.

“Cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (IAANF) in Bologna, who led the research.

Mignoli further explained that galaxies stand and grow wherever galaxies come from, and that the currents of gas available to excite both the galaxy and the central supermassive black hole could flow along the fibers. Scientists say that before this discovery, there was no good explanation for the existence of such a huge early black hole.

Researchers suspect that dark matter could be used to form a web structure, which is believed to attract large amounts of gas to the early universe. Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University, co-author of recent research, says his findings support the idea that most distant and large black holes form and grow under large black objects in large-scale structures. It also says what would be the absence of previous investigations of such constructions due to inspection limitations.

Research has also shown that many galaxies around a supermassive black hole lie in the cosmic “spider’s web” of all gases, which is 300 times the size of a galaxy.

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