They found such stars could grow up to 250,000 times the mass of the sun within 200 million years of the Big Bang – a tantalising result. The team wanted to see if these stars could account for the rapid growth of supermassive black holes, which we see at the centre of nearly every galaxy today. Scientists are now investigating whether supermassive black holes could have formed from supermassive stars which collapsed to form large ‘seed’ black holes, giving them a head start in their growth.ĭr Regan coordinated a project called SmartStars, which used one of the most powerful supercomputers in Ireland, ICHEC, to model how supergiant stars might provide the seeds for supermassive black holes. If the mass of the star was large enough, it will collapse into an object with an immense gravitational pull from which nothing, not even light, can escape – a black hole.Īs the black hole gradually draws in more and more nearby dust and gas it can grow in size, eventually reaching the gigantic proportions of a supermassive black hole, such as the first one ever imaged in April 2019. Once a star has no fuel left to burn, it can no longer support its mass and collapses. ‘That is still a huge problem in astrophysics,’ said Dr John Regan, an astrophysicist from Dublin City University, Ireland.īlack holes form after a massive star runs out of fuel, sometimes resulting from a supernova and other times without a supernova, which is called the direct collapse scenario.

And while several theories for this rapid early black hole growth have been proposed, the answer remains elusive. Our current understanding suggests that in this time frame, only so-called intermediate mass black holes up to 100,000 times the mass of our Sun should have been able to grow.

This is a problem that has long plagued astronomers.

Size of a blackhole