THE giant black holes at the centre of galaxies might have been born in the first split second of the Universe's existence. So say a pair of astrophysicists who think the big bang fireball spawned mini black holes that quickly grew into monsters by feeding on "quintessence", an energy field that might explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
Supermassive black holes many millions of times heavier than the Sun are found at the centre of most galaxies, but nobody is sure how they formed. It is widely accepted that these giants started to develop around the same time as galaxies, at least a billion years after the big bang. Each may have been born in one go, as an extremely large cloud of dust and gas in a newborn galaxy collapsed. Or they may have formed gradually as debris and black holes from stellar explosions settled into galactic centres ...
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