Rare Trio Quasar Merger Creates Ultramassive Black Hole 300 Billion Times the Mass of the Sun

A unique union of three quasars has resulted in the creation of an ultramassive black hole, which is an astronomical behemoth weighing 300 billion times more than the Sun.

Using a supercomputer simulation, researchers were able to witness the merging of three quasars, resulting in the formation of an ultramassive black hole that is 300 billion times more massive than the Sun.

Ultramassive Black Holes

At the center of vast galaxy clusters, enormous cosmic creatures occasionally come into view, ranking among the most elusive and colossal objects throughout the cosmos. According to the Space Academy, these behemoths weigh over 10 billion times more than the Sun, making them even more monstrous than the supermassive black holes detectable at the heart of galaxies such as the Milky Way. Their immense size has long confounded astronomers.

Currently, scientists are investigating an unusual event where three supermassive black holes are at the core of merging galaxies. Through this study, researchers may have finally uncovered the origin of these colossal entities.

Rare Triple Quasar Merger

According to Live Science, astronomers used ASTRID, a high-resolution cosmological simulation, to model the universe’s evolution from over 11 billion years ago. The simulation revealed the formation of an ultramassive black hole resulting from the merger of three galaxies, each with its own quasar, a supermassive black hole that eats gas and produces strong radiation outbursts that can outshine stars in various host galaxies.

The merging of the three quasars resulted in an ultramassive black hole and triggered a feeding frenzy that allowed it to become ultra-massive. The team’s simulation shows that the merger of the triple quasars may have taken place over approximately 150 million years, resulting in the most massive cosmic monster in the simulation.

Lead author Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics, believes that this discovery represents a potential formation channel for ultramassive black holes resulting from extraordinary merger events involving several quasars. The rarity of triple quasar systems could also explain why ultramassive black holes are so elusive across the universe.

According to Ni, ultramassive black holes are elusive giants because the growth of a black hole is a self-regulated process. In an isolated galaxy or system, when a black hole becomes large enough, it emits intense feedback to its surrounding environment, preventing it from growing too rapidly.

The astronomers believe that the formation of an ultramassive black hole, even one with a lower mass, would only occur in extremely rare and exceptional cases, such as the merger of three massive galaxies in this particular instance.

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