There is general agreement among astronomers that X-radiation from the vicinity of supermassive black holes is produced as gas is pulled toward a black hole, and heated to temperatures ranging from millions to billions of degrees. Most of the infalling gas is concentrated in a rapidly rotating disk, the inner part of which has a hot atmosphere or corona where temperatures can climb to billions of degrees.
Although the precise geometry and details of the X-ray production are not known, observations of numerous quasars, or supermassive black holes, have shown that many of them have very similar X-ray spectra, especially at high X-ray energies. This suggests that the basic geometry and mechanism are the same for these objects.
The remarkable similarity of the X-ray spectra of the young supermassive black holes to those of much older ones means that the supermassive black holes and their accretion disks, were already in place less than a billion years after the big bang. One possibility is that millions of 100 solar-mass black holes formed from the collapse of massive stars in the young galaxy, and subsequently built up a billion solar-mass black hole in the center of the galaxy through mergers and accretion of gas.
To answer the question of how and when supermassive black holes were formed, astronomers plan to use the very deep Chandra exposures and other surveys to identify and study quasars at even earlier ages.
The paper by Schwartz and Virani on SDSSp J1306 was published in the November 1, 2004, issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The paper by Duncan Farrah and colleagues on SDSS J1030 was published in the August 10, 2004, issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Chandra observed J1306 with its Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer instrument for approximately 33 hours in November 2003. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington. Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif., formerly TRW, Inc., was the prime development contractor for the observatory. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.
Text for this article comes from a NASA press release.
one billion solar masses, was amazingly large when I read about this elsewhere, but I was at first stunned by the claim “Primordial Black Holes Gobbled Up Twenty Trillion Suns.” Then I realized it was a typo which mixed the amount of material a certain black hole has consumed with the amount of energy it is radiating. From a thermodynamical point of view, black holes are very efficient at converting the gravipotential energy of infalling matter into outflowing electromagnetic energy and the kinetic energy of highly accelerated outward moving particles (in bipolar jets). What the article was trying to convey was that the black hole and environs radiate 20,000 times as much power, per unit mass, as an equivalent mass of solar-type stars.