Supermassive black hole
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Top: artist's conception of a supermassive black hole tearing apart a star. Bottom: images believed to show a supermassive black hole devouring a star in galaxy RXJ 1242-11. Left: X-ray image, Right: optical image.^[1]

A supermassive black hole is a black hole with a mass of an order of magnitude between 10⁵ and 1.8x 10¹⁰ solar masses. Most if not all galaxies, including the Milky Way^[2], are believed to contain supermassive black holes at their centers.^[3][4]

Supermassive black holes have properties which distinguish them from their relatively low-mass cousins:

• The average density of a supermassive black hole (measured as the mass of the black hole divided by its Schwarzschild volume) can be very low, and may actually be lower than the density of air. This is because the Schwarzschild radius is directly proportional to mass, while density is inversely proportional to the volume. Since the volume of a spherical object (such as the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole) is directly proportional to the cube of the radius, and mass merely increases linearly, the volume increases at a greater rate than mass. Thus, density decreases for increasingly larger radii of black holes. One should be aware however that this phenomenon results from scientific definitions and does not necessarily manifest itself as a real physical property.
• The tidal forces in the vicinity of the event horizon are significantly weaker. Since the central singularity is so far away from the horizon, a hypothetical astronaut travelling towards the black hole center would not experience significant tidal force until very deep into the black hole.

Formation

An artist's conception of a supermassive black hole accreting from a disk. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

There are several models for the formation of black holes of this size. The most obvious is by slow accretion of matter starting from a black hole of stellar size. Another model of supermassive black hole formation involves a large gas cloud collapsing into a relativistic star of perhaps a hundred thousand solar masses or larger. The star would then become unstable to radial perturbations due to electron-positron pair production in its core, and may collapse directly into a black hole without a supernova explosion, which would eject most of its mass and prevent it from leaving a supermassive black hole as a remnant. Yet another model involves a dense stellar cluster undergoing core-collapse as the negative heat capacity of the system drives the velocity dispersion in the core to relativistic speeds. Finally, primordial black holes may have been produced directly from external pressure in the first instants after the Big Bang.

The difficulty in forming a supermassive black hole resides in the need for enough matter to be in a small enough volume. This matter needs to have very little angular momentum in order for this to happen. Normally the process of accretion involves transporting a large initial endowment of angular momentum outwards, and this appears to be the limiting factor in black hole growth, and explains the formation of accretion disks.

Currently, there appears to be a gap in the observed mass distribution of black holes. There are stellar-mass black holes, generated from collapsing stars, which range up to perhaps 33 solar masses. The minimal supermassive black hole is in the range of a hundred thousand solar masses. Between these regimes there appears to be a dearth of objects. Such a gap would suggest qualitatively different formation processes. However, some models suggest that ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) may be black holes from this missing group.

Doppler measurements

Direct Doppler measures of water masers surrounding the nucleus of nearby galaxies have revealed a very fast keplerian motion, only possible with a high concentration of matter in the center. Currently, the only known objects that can pack enough matter in such a small space are black holes, or things that will evolve into black holes within astrophysically short timescales. For active galaxies farther away, the width of broad spectral lines can be used to probe the gas orbiting near the event horizon. The technique of reverberation mapping uses variability of these lines to measure the mass, and perhaps the spin of the black hole that powers the active galaxy's "engine".

Such supermassive black holes in the center of many galaxies are thought to be the "engine" of active objects such as Seyfert galaxies and quasars. The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and UCLA Galactic Center Group^[5] provided evidence that Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole residing at the center of the Milky Way based on data from the ESO^[6] and the Keck telescopes.^[7] Our galactic central black hole is calculated to have a mass of approximately 4.1 million solar masses.^[8]

Supermassive black holes outside the Milky Way

There are a handful of galaxies aside from the Milky Way in which the presence of a supermassive black hole can unambiguously be inferred from the motion of stars or gas near the center. These include two other galaxies in the Local Group, Messier 31 and Messier 32. In a larger number of so-called active galaxies and quasars, the presence of a supermassive black hole is implied by the "activity" of the nucleus, i.e. by the emission of large amounts of radiation, presumably from gas that is spiralling in to the black hole. It is currently believed that the majority of bright galaxies contain a supermassive black hole but that most are in an "inactive" state not accreting much matter. Currently, there is no compelling evidence for massive black holes at the centers of globular clusters, dwarf galaxies, or smaller stellar systems.

At least one galaxy, Galaxy 0402+379 , appears to have two supermassive black holes at its center, forming a binary system. Should these collide, the event would create strong gravitational waves. Binary supermassive black holes are believed to be a common consequence of galaxy mergers ^[9].

Supermassive black hole mass and galaxy formation

There appears to be a link between the mass of the supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy and the morphology of the galaxy itself. This manifests as a correlation between the mass of the spheroid (the bulge of spiral galaxies, and the whole galaxy for ellipticals) and the mass of the supermassive black hole. There is an even tighter correlation between the black hole mass and the velocity dispersion of the spheroid, the M-sigma relation. The explanation for this correlation remains an unsolved problem in astrophysics. It is believed that black holes and their host galaxies coevolved between 300-800 million years after the Big Bang, passing through a quasar phase and developing correlated characteristics, but models differ on the causality of whether black holes triggered galaxy formation or vice versa, and sequential formation cannot be excluded. The unknown nature of dark matter is a crucial variable in these models.^[10][11][12]

See also

Further reading

• Fulvio Melia (2003). The Edge of Infinity. Supermassive Black Holes in the Universe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81405-8. 
• Fulvio Melia (2007). The Galactic Supermassive Black Hole. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13129-0. 

References

1. ^ Chandra :: Photo Album :: RX J1242-11 :: 18 Feb 04
2. ^ "Seeing a Star Orbit around the Supermassive Black Hole at the centre of the Milky Way", R. Schödel, et al., Nature, Vol 419, pp. 694-696, October 16, 2002
3. ^ Antonucci, R. (1993). "Unified Models for Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars". Annual Reviews in Astronomy and Astrophysics 31 (1): 473–521. doi:10.1146/annurev.aa.31.090193.002353. 
4. ^ Urry, P.; Paolo Padovani (1995). "Unified schemes for radio–loud AGN". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 107: 803–845. doi:10.1086/133630. 
5. ^ UCLA Galactic Center Group
6. ^ ESO - 2002
7. ^ http://www.keckobservatory.org/news/old_pages/andreaghez.html
8. ^ http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/27621359.html
9. ^ D. Merritt and M. Milosavljevic (2005). "Massive Black Hole Binary Evolution." http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2005-8/
10. ^ Robert Roy Britt (2003-07-29). "The New History of Black Holes: 'Co-evolution' Dramatically Alters Dark Reputation".
11. ^ "Interview: Andrea Ghez" (2006-06-17).
12. ^ "Astronomers crack cosmic chicken-or-egg dilemma" (2003-07-22).

• Julian H. Krolik (1999). Active Galactic Nuclei. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01151-6. 

External links

• Black Holes: Gravity's Relentless Pull Award-winning interactive multimedia Web site about the physics and astronomy of black holes from the Space Telescope Science Institute
• Images of supermassive black holes
• NASA images of supermassive black holes
• Is there a Supermassive Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way? (arxiv preprint)
• The black hole at the heart of the Milky Way
• ESO video clip of orbiting star (533 KB MPEG Video)
• Star Orbiting Massive Milky Way Centre Approaches to within 17 Light-Hours ESO, October 21, 2002
• Early Black Holes Grew Up Quickly
• Images, Animations, and New Results from the UCLA Galactic Center Group
• Washington Post article on Supermassive black holes
• A simulation of the stars orbiting the Milky Way's central massive black hole

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