The Black Hole Fountain: Matter is Blown Away ✦
How are supermassive black holes born in the early universe? New research shows that when a giant gas cloud contracts, shock waves are generated, racing at nearly the speed of light. They unleash a sea of energy, slowing the infall of matter — like a traffic jam on a highway, where cars alternately brake and accelerate. This sheds light on the mysterious 'little red dots' discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The telescope James Webb has found black holes in the early Universe with masses of billions of suns, even though there was catastrophically little time for them to grow. One explanation is the direct collapse of a huge cloud almost devoid of heavy elements. But such an infall is anything but calm.
During the rapid compression, a shock wave arises — like water splashing out of a narrow neck if you pour it too fast.
As a result, the black hole receives 5–7 times less mass.
But the same wave, according to the mass-energy equivalence law, converts up to a tenth of the infalling gas into radiation — twice as efficiently as the spinning gas disk. This flare heats the cloud, creating bright 'cocoons' that Webb sees in the active nuclei of distant galaxies (their light is strongly reddened due to the Universe's expansion).
The calculations are based on the Schwarzschild solution for black holes, the general relativity equations of Einstein, and the theory of shock discontinuities of Landau; disruptions in the flow are inevitable according to the law of increasing disorder, and future computer simulations will test these ideas.
🎯 For a black hole to shine at the edge of the Universe, it first has to spit out almost everything it planned to devour.