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A huge number of supermassive thugs black holes can roam the universe, new simulations find.
In fact, giant wandering black holes can account for a whopping 10% of the mass of black holes in the nearby “” budget “” universe, according to the research. It means that galaxies like ours, there could be an average of 12 invisible behemoths lurking around their outskirts, gobbling up anything that gets in their way.
According to the study’s researchers, because the number of black holes increases the more mass there is in the outer “halo” of matter that surrounds galaxies, clusters of galaxies, which have heavy halos, may have even more voracious vagabonds.
Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe
“We expect thousands of black holes roaming the halos of galaxy clusters,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Just as a panama basket can be woven around the support structure of a stone, astronomers believe most galaxies form around supermassive black holes. The gigantic gravitational beasts, often millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun, serve as anchors for long trains of gas, dust, stars and planets that swirl in orbit around them. Closer to black holes, this material coils faster and heats up, forming an accretion disk that both feeds the black hole and produces the telltale radiation that makes it visible.
Usually, the mass of these black holes holds them together at the center of their galaxies, which slowly orbit each other in clusters called galactic groups. But sometimes an enormous force – like a collision between two galaxies – can burst a central supermassive black hole, forcing it to wander the universe like a cosmic wanderer.
Wandering monsters can also be dropped when the merger of two black holes is disrupted, causing one or both to fly.
To estimate how often this happens, astronomers ran a set of simulations called Romulus that take into account all of the known rules about how black holes behave to plot how their orbits might evolve over billions of years.
The simulations predicted that the frequent galactic collisions of the early universe, between the time of the big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and about 2 billion years later, produced enough wanderers to outnumber, if not outnumber, their cousins ​​galactically fixed supermassive black holes.
Later, as the universe grew older, many loose black holes merged and were taken over by other supermassive black holes after forming binary systems with them at the center of galaxies, the simulations revealed. But many have also remained free.
Romulus predicts that many supermassive black hole binaries form after billions of years of orbital evolution, while some SMBH [supermassive black holes] will never reach the center, “the researchers wrote.” As a result, mass galaxies from the Milky Way to Romulus host an average of 12 supermassive black holes, which typically roam the halo far from the galactic center.
The researchers “the next steps will be to uncover the possible characteristics of the presence of the invisible giants lost” in the universe so that one day soon we can observe them firsthand.
The researchers published their findings in the June issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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