Black holes can collide with each other, leading to the growth of other black holes. The collision reportedly occurs due to a condition akin to traffic jams.
Black Holes Collisions
According to a new study titled "The effect of thermal torques on AGN disc migration traps and gravitational wave populations," supermassive black holes or cosmic monsters create a condition similar to "cosmic intersections with failed traffic lights," which makes collisions between smaller stellar-mass black holes unavoidable.
The researchers behind the new traffic-jam discoveries are from Monash University. They examined the dynamics of both embedded black holes and accretion disks.
Stellar-mass black holes in these accretion disks may migrate through the disk due to their interactions with the surrounding gas. According to the team's theory, this causes stellar-mass black holes to gather in areas they refer to as "migration traps."
Because of the traffic congestion, there is a higher chance of two star mass black holes coming into contact, crashing into one another, and merging in these areas than anyplace else in the nearby galaxy.
Evgeni Grishin, the team leader and researcher at Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy, went one step further and compared these migration traps for stellar-mass black holes surrounding supermassive black holes to congested intersections in our planet without functioning traffic lights.
According to Grishin, they considered the number and location of these major crossroads. In this process, thermal impacts are very important because they affect the stability and placement of migration traps. One implication is that in highly bright active galaxies, they do not observe migration traps.
The team's findings not only have significant ramifications for our comprehension of the processes involved in mergers of stellar-mass black holes, but they may also eventually contribute to the advancement of gravitational wave astronomy since these mergers produce a burst of minute ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.
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Tiny Black Holes Eating Stars From Their Cores
In another study, researchers learned that stars like the Sun might have absorbed tiny black holes. They might have slurped up the material to create new black holes.
The universe is filled with innumerable black holes of all sizes. Researchers have identified black holes whose stellar mass ranges are most likely the result of core collapse and mergers between dead big stars. Supermassive objects, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the Sun, can be found in every galaxy. There are also black holes with masses in between, which are elusive but becoming more common.
Researchers still haven't found tiny black holes with masses comparable to those of planets, moons, or asteroids. These things can't collapse into a dense mass similar to a black hole since they don't have the mass and gravitational force to do so.
On the other hand, there exists a theoretical situation wherein small black holes could have been created. Researchers had hypothesized that in the early moments after the Big Bang when the matter in the universe was still hot and dense enough to allow extra-density patches to collapse into inevitable spacetime regions, microscopic black holes might have formed. This idea was first put forth by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, and other scientists have since developed it.
The researchers found that the smallest black holes will have difficulty growing. It would take billions of years for the stable to be consumed by the black hole.
But a dwarf planet-mass black hole would be considerably more voracious. As it started to consume the center of a stratifying Sun, the material whirling around it formed a disk that radiated a tremendous quantity of heat and light.
In a billion years, the accretion ring revolving around the black hole would feed the star instead of fusion. Paradoxically, the star's light would originate from the black hole. Scientists named this hypothetical star - the Hawking star.
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