An article that will be published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research on the origin of supermassive black holes. A team of Italian scientists led by Fabio Pacucci of Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa used NASA’s space telescopes to identify two ancient objects that represent the best candidates black hole “seeds” found so far.

Common black holes form through the collapse of what remains of a star after it exploded into a supernova but what about supermassive black holes? For some time there have been discussions about the origin of the first generation of these monsters with masses of millions and sometimes billions of times the Sun which probably are at the center of almost all large galaxies.

One theory is that supermassive black holes grow from seeds generated from gas and the merger of smaller black holes, with an initial mass ranging from ten to a few hundred solar masses. According to another theory, they form from seeds generated directly from the collapse of a gas cloud that has a very high overall mass, without intermediate phases.

The observations indicate that at least some supermassive black holes formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. If the first theory is correct, they should have grown at an abnormally high speed to reach the mass of the oldest supermassive black holes discovered.

The new findings support the other theory which predicts seeds with a mass 100.000 times that of the Sun formed directly from the collapse of a massive gas cloud. This mass would be already very high at the start with a very large gravitational field and it would give the black hole the chance to grow faster.

The Italian researchers used computer models of black hole seeds combined with a new way to screen candidates. The research was carried out among the observations of NASA’s Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Two candidates match the theoretical profile at infrared, are very red and emit X-rays detected by Chandra. Estimates of their distance suggests that they might have formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

Fabio Pacucci and his co-workers Andrea Ferrara, Andrea Grazian, Fabrizio Fiore, Emanuele Giallongo and Simonetta Puccetti are cautious about the conclusions of their research. The supermassive black hole seeds are very difficult to find but they must keep on looking for them to get further verification of the model of their birth.

Despite the use of NASA’s space telescopes, the observations of the discovered candidates are still limited. It’s one of the cases in which additional studies will be conducted in the coming years when the James Webb Space Telescope but also ESO’s European Extremely Large Telescope will be available as they’ll be able to make even more detailed observations of those very distant objects.