Simulations on the Frontera supercomputer have helped astrophysicists unravel the origin of supermassive black holes that formed about 11 billion years ago.
Yueying Ni, Research Fellow at Harvard University, is the lead author of the paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters in December 2022, which announced the discovery of the formation of a supermassive black hole from the merger of triple quasars, systems of three galactic nuclei illuminated by gas and dust falling into a supermassive black hole.
Working hand in hand with telescope data, computational modeling is helping astrophysicists fill in missing information about the origins of stars and exotic objects like black holes.
One of the largest cosmological simulations to date is called Astrid. It was developed with the participation of Ewing Nee. This is the largest galaxy formation simulation yet.
Astrid show something absolutely stunning – the formation of black holes can reach a theoretical upper limit of 10 billion solar masses.
“This is a very difficult computational problem. But you can only capture these rare and extreme objects with high volume simulations,” Ewing Ni said.
Nee’s research team found that three supermassive black holes accumulated their mass at “cosmic noon” (11 billion years ago), when star formation, active galactic nuclei and supermassive black holes were at their peak.
Source: Yueying Ni et al, Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z ∼ 2, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2022). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aca160
