Scientists are using the ASTRID cosmological simulation to understand ultra-massive black holes. These are the biggest things in space, with some that weigh millions or even billions times more than our Sun! By running simulations on TACC’s Frontera supercomputer, experts have learned that these huge black holes were created around 11 billion years ago.
Yueying Ni, a scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said they found something cool: there might be super-massive black holes created by huge galaxies crashing into each other during the ‘cosmic noon’ period.
Ni is the main person behind an important discovery published in The Astrophysical Journal. This discovery shows how ultra-massive black holes can form from three galactic cores merging together and getting energy from a massive black hole.
Astronomers need Telescope data plus Computational simulations to understand how stars and other stuff like black holes were created.
Recently, Ni has co-developed the largest cosmological simulation ever called Astrid. It uses lots of memory and is used to study far away galaxies, black holes and how they were re-ionized in the past. The simulation covers hundreds of millions of light years but can look into very small details too.
A scientist called Ni built Astrid with the help of a supercomputer known as Frontera, which officially holds the title of being the most powerful college-level supercomputer in America and is supported financially by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Ni also said that they only used Frontera to launch this project which means that it was only made with Frontera’s help.
Frontera is perfect for Ni’s Astrid simulations because it can handle big applications that need thousands of computers working together. That was why they used 2,048 nodes – the biggest number allowed in the big queue – on a regular basis. You can only do this powerful computation on large supercomputers like Frontera.
Astrid simulations, done by Ni, uncovered something amazing– black holes can grow up to 10 billion times the mass of our sun! It was hard for the computer to understand this idea, but with a large simulated space it could happen.
We discovered three extremely big black holes that gained their size around 11 billion years ago. This was at a time when stars were forming and AGN (active galactic nuclei), as well as supermassive black holes, were very active.
About half of all the stars in space were made during a long period of time that scientists call “cosmic noon”. To find this out, people from different kinds of observatories used data from lots of galaxy surveys to learn things like how old the stars were, when they were born, and what elements they are made up of.
Recently, scientists noticed 3 huge galaxies merging in a very short time. Each of these giant galaxies is 10 times bigger than our own Milky Way Galaxy and each one has a supermassive black hole at its centre. This discovery suggests that when 3 such giant galaxies interact and come together, they may create ultra-massive black holes.
We are trying to figure out why and how some supermassive black holes form into ultra-massive ones. To do this, we’re using the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to get a closer look at galaxies from space. We call this ‘observations for JWST data from the Astrid simulation.’
NASA is going to launch a special telescope called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). This will help us learn more about how big black holes join together, why galaxies merge and change over time. This news is exciting for scientists because it means they can use simulations to predict what they’ll see through this new telescope.
Ni’s research team is going to take a look at galaxies that contain AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei). It will figure out how these special galaxies look like compared to other galaxies that existed during cosmic noon.
Using technology such as supercomputers, they are able to build a detailed model of the universe and use it to make predictions from observations.
This article, called “Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z ∼ 2,” was written on 30 November 2022.
