This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: We know the universe is constantly expanding. We also know that gravitationally bound objects, such as solar systems and black holes, seem to be immune to that expansion.
But a new paper by theoretical physicists Valerio Faraoni and Massimiliano Rinaldi challenges that assumption. They suggest that black holes can't just ignore the expanding universe around them. Instead, they have to expand along with it.
Their paper is posted to the arXiv preprint server. As with many insightful theoretical breakthroughs, it comes at a time of contradictory observational evidence. Thomas Kuhn would be proud.
Over the past few years, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and other new observatories have been looking back to the dawn of the universe. And they have been finding supermassive black holes there. Specifically, they found them inside "infant" galaxies that should never have been able to support them.
They appear to have formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. However, according to astrophysics textbooks, they should not exist so early. There is a physical speed limit to how fast gas can fall into a black hole, known as the Eddington limit, which, in theory at least, limits the size they should have been able to grow to by the time the JWST observed them.
In other words, the early universe was not old enough for these supermassive black holes to get that large. To understand an alternative solution, we first have to look at how physicists model black holes themselves. Typically, they use the Schwarzschild solution, which was formulated more than a century ago.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
