Supermassive black holes are monsters millions to billions of times heavier than our Sun that lurk at the centers of most galaxies in our universe, including our own. Milky Way – and are best recognized by the glowing disks of gas swirling around them. These discs are the remnants of unfortunate stars that were once cut up and trapped by black holes that actually feed on these discs themselves. Yet scientists still aren’t sure exactly how black holes feast.
For example, astrophysicists have puzzled over why material that gets swept away gets swept away for decades Black hole he does not immediately fall into his abyss. Instead, it all comes together to create and sustain a hot, rapidly spinning disk, which then spirals toward the black hole. And at the same time, the disk radiates brilliantly and at the same time transforms gravitational energy into heat. The disk is the main source of light from the black hole, and it floats as long as there is material nearby that the void can absorb.
A new computer simulation suggests that this prolonged existence of accretion disks may be due to each disk being almost completely dominated by the magnetic fields of the respective black hole. It is possible that these fields direct the gas into a disk shape. Scientists say that the simulation that first timetracing the path of pristine gas from the early universe to the point at which it ends up in the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole can help them fine-tune their predictions about various aspects of accretion disks, including their masses, thicknesses, and the velocity of the infalling material.
“Our theories told us that the disks should be flat like pancakes,” said Phil Hopkins, a theoretical astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology. declaration. “But we knew that wasn’t right, because astronomical observations reveal that the discs are actually fluffy—more like an angel cake. Our simulation helped us understand that the magnetic fields support the disc material, making it fluffier.”
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Hopkins and his team did what they describe as a “super zoom” on one virtual one supermassive black hole. To virtually replicate the dynamics of a black hole, the scientists inserted information about the physics of various cosmic phenomena on the scale of galaxies. These included the governing equations gravitation, dark matter and dark energy — the last of which are the elusive substances making up most of the contents of the universe — as well as stars and galaxies. Creating such a simulation was not only a computational challenge, but also one that required code that could simply handle all the complex physics, the researchers say.
The culmination of two major collaborations at Caltech called FIRE, which focuses on large-scale structures in universe, and STARFORGE, which probes small-scale structures, allowed the team to create a simulation whose resolution is a thousand times better than its predecessor, according to a university statement. “We built it in a very modular way, so you could turn any part of the physics on and off that you wanted for a given problem, but they were all compatible with each other,” Hopkins said.
Using this code, scientists simulated a black hole 10 million times heavier than our sun, starting from the early universe. The simulation then flies through a complex tangle of merging galaxies before approaching an active supermassive black hole, or quasarcircled by an accretion disk that is seen feeding gas into the black hole at rates comparable to the brightest known quasars in our universe.
The magnetic fields can be seen to remove momentum from the disk, which frees the material to spiral inward until it reaches the disk. event horizon or the “surface” of a black hole where it cannot escape.
“In our simulation, we see this accretion disk forming around the black hole,” Hopkins said in a statement. “We would have been very excited if we had just seen the accretion disk, but what was very surprising was that the simulated disk does not look like what we have thought for decades it should look like.”
The findings are described in paper published in March in The Open Journal of Astrophysics.