baryons tagged posts

Study points to a seed black hole produced by a dark matter halo collapse. Supermassive black holes, or SMBHs, are black holes with masses that are several million to billion times the mass of our sun. The Milky Way hosts an SMBH with mass a few million times the solar mass. Surprisingly, astrophysical observations show that SMBHs already existed when the universe was very young. For example, a billion solar mass black holes are found when the universe was just 6% of its current age, 13.7 billion years. How do these SMBHs in the early universe originate?

A team led by a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has come up with an explanation: a massive seed black hole that the collapse of a dark matter halo could produce.

Dark matter halo is the halo of ...

A simulation of the cosmic web, or diffuse tendrils of gas connecting galaxies across the universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Hallman (CU Boulder); Nicastro et al. Observations of the missing baryons in the warm–hot intergalactic medium. Nature, 2018; 558 (7710): 406 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0204-1

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have helped to find the last reservoir of ordinary matter hiding in the universe. Ordinary matter, or “baryons,” make up all physical objects in existence, from stars to the cores of black holes. But until now, astrophysicists had only been able to locate about two-thirds of the matter that theorists predict was created by the Big Bang.

In the new research, an international team pinned down the missing third, finding it in the space between galaxies...