[Olde Duff Gets Seriouser]
SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES
ARE MOSTLY PRIMORDIAL DARK MATTER
[Draft 8/19/2023][UPDATED 5.4.24] & [9.25.24]
THE BIG NEWS..
..Is from the James Webb Space Telescope. There were furiously active galaxies very soon after the Big Bang, not that long after the first generation stars happened. This implies supermassive black holes at the centers of the new galaxies. The question, "how did these giant black holes get there so early?" seems not quite answered by the two main contenders, "Giant dust collapse," and "Many stellar black holes consolidating."
Thus I decided to toss this hat into the ring:
At the big bang, and dark matter was the first matter of any kind to form (perhaps during the mysterious “inflation” event -- my personal theory). It’s mutual gravitational attraction and lack of interaction to any electromagnetic force allowed it to exist and start to coalesce, even in the heat of the BB, long before baryonic matter could. There was a vast quantity of dark matter, 27% of all extant mass/energy (68% was the even more mysterious dark energy. ) The ordinary baryonic matter -- 5% of everything -- became hydrogen and helium nuclei with no electrons, so not atoms yet.
380,000 years later things cooled down enough for “recombination” to happen and neutral atoms began to form, exclusively hydrogen and helium, but it was still 150-300 million years before the first stars formed from baryonic matter. This small 5% bit of Big Bang product makes up all the stuff we can see in the universe!
During that 150-300 million years, dark matter was already forming invisible “stars”. Gravity is the only observable reaction we see (yet) from dark matter, and in those first years after the BB it started attracting itself into larger and larger clumps. Call them "stars."
These stars don’t shine, they just pulled more dark matter into themselves as they grew ever more massive. They grew fast. And kept growing because dark matter was/is so abundant.
It seems obvious (to me) that the gravity of these clumps of dark matter accelerated the agglomeration of baryonic matter, creating the first visible stars then galaxies rather faster than would have happened without the dark matter clumps.
AT THE SAME TIME....
Black holes, including super-massive ones started forming. They are overwhelmingly dark matter plus a bit of normal matter that they have eaten. There wasn't nearly enough baryonic matter to matter, so we will call that bit "PLUS" or just +.
SO...
Every galaxy in the universe (except for the "dwarf"ones) has a dark matter+ black hole at its center. Twenty-seven percent of all matter is still considered to be dark matter. It is distributed throughout the universe as the black holes and the even more massive "halos"* in and around that endless field of galaxies we see in our telescopes and in all those beyond our view. Without the dark matter+ black holes, galaxy formation would have been much slower and probably wildly different.
Lo and behold, the James Webb Space Telescope has just recorded a bunch of these early-universe supermassive black holes! JWST is seeing the ordinary matter of course, blasting out the fury of rapidly forming galaxies swirling around these giant black holes. (They can be seen because they are so big and bright; undoubtedly there are billions more just a bit too small to be seen, yet. IMO.)
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| There is a great article in Quanta Magazine explaining what real scientists think about all this. |
The only (har!) explanation is that the dark matter super stars and black holes helped galaxies form far earlier than our cosmology models once said they should. Even our Milky Way traces back 13 billion years, almost the lifetime of the Universe (13.8 billion YA).
Bottom Line:
Super-massive black holes are mostly dark matter
+ a bit of baryonic matter!**
(Best I can tell, this is not a conclusion reached by real scientists at this time.)
Hey, I'm a real science fiction author!
* Take our Milky Way for instance. Our supermassive black hole SAG-A*... has the mass of over four million Sols. The dark matter "halo" around our galaxy is estimated to have the mass of up to 346 billion Sols, or maybe a trillion -- depends on who you believe. But seriously massive. Perhaps as much as 95% of the total mass of our galaxy.
**I could be wrong, but it seems most real scientists think black holes are totally constituted of collapsed baryonic matter.
BTW: Here is a deep space look into my sci-fi books. One must promote, y'know.
SPREADING THE QUESTION:
This is the text I sent to Quanta Magazine on a subsequent topic about "Dark Matter Clumps" being looked for by JWST and radio astronomy:
Check me on this.
At the big bang, and dark matter was the first matter of any kind to form (perhaps during the mysterious “inflation” event -- my personal theory). It’s mutual gravitational attraction and lack of interaction to any electromagnetic force allowed it to exist and start to coalesce, even in the heat of the BB, long before baryonic matter could. The ordinary baryonic matter -- 5% of everything -- became hydrogen and helium nuclei with no electrons, so not atoms yet.
380,000 years later things cooled down enough for “recombina February 22, 2024tion” to happen and neutral atoms began to form, exclusively hydrogen and helium. No stars had formed yet, and this time is called "the dark ages" of the early universe. It wa 150-300 million years before the first stars formed from baryonic matter.
Recently, a series of galactic anomalies has sparked a scramble to explore alternatives. This “complex” dark matter might be as simple as sub-atomic particles that bounce off each other, or as complicated as families of dark particles that form dark atoms, stars and even galaxies. There is a daunting variety of possibilities." Well whadda y'know!
Our understanding of how galaxies form and the nature of dark matter could be completely upended after new observations of a stellar population bigger than the Milky Way from more than 11 billion years ago that should not exist.
MIT physicists: Exotic black holes could be a byproduct of dark matter
In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted
microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News (Great article, clear & well written.)
(Continuing more confidently after those updates!) During that 150-300 million years, dark matter was already forming invisible “stars”. Gravity is the only observable reaction we see (yet) from dark matter, and in those first years after the BB it started attracting itself into larger and larger clumps. Call them "stars." This article calls them little lumps.
These stars don’t shine, they just pulled more dark matter into themselves as they grew ever more massive. They grew fast. And kept growing because dark matter was/is so abundant.
It seems obvious (to me) that the gravity of these clumps of dark matter accelerated the agglomeration of baryonic matter, catalyzing the first visible stars then galaxies rather faster than would have happened without the dark matter clumps.
Black holes, including super-massive ones started forming. They are overwhelmingly dark matter plus a bit of normal matter that they have eaten. There wasn't nearly enough baryonic matter to build a serious, 200K+ Sols black holes in the time frame of < 0.5 million years.
The only (har!) explanation is that the dark matter super stars and black holes helped galaxies form far earlier than our cosmology models once said they should. Even our Milky Way traces back 13 billion years, almost the lifetime of the Universe.
Bottom Line:
All or most of the universe's super-massive black holes are mostly dark matter+ a bit of baryonic matter ingested since the surrounding galaxies formed.
Possible?
Comments
This article provides a perfect example of how general intelligence can be more powerful than highly developed specialized expert knowledge in that it more easily challenges the prevailing "wisdom" of scientific dogma.