Supermassive black holes can spring to life and grow to a monstrous size ‘very, very quickly’

You wouldn't want to be nearby when one of these galactic monster roars to life and starts munching up everything around it.

If you suspect there’s a black hole growing near you, it’s probably a good idea to think about moving to another star system.

And you wouldn’t want to hang about, because scientists have discovered that ‘supermassive’ monsters can form ‘very, very quickly’ before speedily swelling to become millions of times denser than our sun.

Astrophysicists from the University of Western Ontario have claimed that black holes can come into being in a way that no-one expected.

They have devised a new model to explain why supermassive holes formed way back at the beginning of our universe, even though there ‘was previously no scientific explanation’ to explain how they roared to life.

Until now, scientists had several explanations about how the beasts are born.

The first was that they formed from ‘seeds’, whilst another suggested they sprung from ‘star remnants’.

But the latest research has found they may have simply from the ‘direct collapse’ at the centre of ‘proto-galaxies’ in the early stages of their development.

‘We describe a mechanism by which supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can form directly in the nuclei of protogalaxies, without the need for ‘seed’ black holes left over from early star formation,’ the team wrote in their paper.

‘Self-gravitating gas in dark matter haloes can lose angular momentum rapidly via runaway, global dynamical instabilities, the so-called “bars within bars” mechanism.

‘This leads to the rapid build-up of a dense, self-gravitating core supported by gas pressure – surrounded by a radiation pressure-dominated envelope – which gradually contracts and is compressed further by subsequent infall.

‘We show that these conditions lead to such high temperatures in the central region that the gas cools catastrophically by thermal neutrino emission, leading to the formation and rapid growth of a central black hole.’

Over the past decades, astronomers have been to peer so far into space they are effectively looking back in time to an era 800 million years after the universe was born.

‘Supermassive black holes only had a short time period where they were able to grow fast and then at some point, because of all the radiation in the universe created by other black holes and stars, their production came to a halt,’ said Shantanu Basu from Western’s department of physics and astronomy.

However, you shouldn’t get too worried about the formation and growth of black holes, because even under the new model of their formation they take tens of millions of years to grow and become monsters.