How the first super-massive black holes were born

This undated image released by NASA shows young star HD 61005, dubbed "The Moth." Its shape is produced by starlight scattering off dust and is giving astronomers new insight into the formation and evolution of planetary systems. This is not your typical flying insect. It has a wingspan of about 22 billion miles. The Hubble image was taken with the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The black disk in the center of the image is a coronagraphic hole in the NICMOS camera that blocks out most of the central star's light so that astronomers can see details in the surrounding dust disk. (AP Photo/NASA)

This artists rendering provided by NASA shows dusty grains -- including tiny specks of the minerals found in the gemstones peridot, sapphires, and rubies -- that can be seen blowing in the winds of a quasar, or active black hole. The quasar is at the center of a distant galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence that such quasar winds might have forged these dusty particles in the very early universe. The findings are another clue in an ongoing cosmic mystery: where did all the dust in our young universe come from? (AP Photo/NASA) This image released by NASA Wednesday April 19, 2006 shows a visualization of what Einstein envisioned. Researchers crunched Einstein's theory of general relativity on the Columbia supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center to create a three-dimensional simulation of merging black holes. This was the largest astrophysical calculation ever performed on a NASA supercomputer. The simulation provides the foundation to explore the universe in an entirely new way, through the detection of gravitational waves. (AP Photo/NASA)

This artist's depiction, provided by NASA, demonstrates what scientists believe is happening very close to the Sagittarius A* black hole in the Milky Way. The supermassive black hole is surrounded by a disk of gas (yellow and red). Massive stars, shown in blue, have formed in this disk, while small disks represent where stars are still forming. Results from the Chandra X-ray Observatory show that stars have formed locally in this disk, rather than being deposited there by a star cluster. The mysterious black hole has helped give birth to a new generation of stars, new observations suggest. (AP Photo/NASA, CXC, M. Weiss)

An image released by NASA Jan. 5, 2010, shows Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy made from data provided by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The Chandra image of Sagittarius A and the surrounding region is based on data from a series of observations lasting a total of about one million seconds, or almost two weeks. (AP Photo/NASA)

This image provided by NASA Tuesday Nov. 11, 2009 shows observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory in a collaboration to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy using infrared light and X-ray light to see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core.
This image provided by NASA this July 23, 2009 is a photo made by the Spitzer Space Telescope of the galaxy, called NGC-1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white. The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star.




Photo released by NASA Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002 showing medium-size black holes, according to the latest findings from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, but scientists had to look in some unexpected places to find them. The previously undiscovered black holes provide an important link that sheds light on the way in which black holes grow. Even more odd, these new black holes were found in the cores of glittering, "beehive" swarms of stars called globular star clusters, which orbit our Milky Way and other galaxies. The black hole in globular cluster M15 ,left, is 4,000 times more massive than our Sun. G1 ,right, a much larger globular cluster, harbors a heftier black hole, about 20,000 times more massive than our Sun. (AP Photo/NASA)



Mosaic image of a galactic center taken by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory showing the center region of our Milky Way revealing hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes bathed in an incadencent fog of multimillion degree gas. The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is located inside a bright white path in the center of the image. The colors indicate X-ray energy bands in red (low), green (medium), and blue (high). (AP Photo/NASA,D.Wang, U.Mass)

This undated handout artist rendering provided by the European Southern Observatory/L.Calcada, shows uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars. Scientists at the European Southern Observatory spied a pair of gigantic bubbles of hot gas coming from a stellar black hole, about 12 million light years from Earth, as pictured in this artist's rendering from the observatory. The bubbles are the most powerful microquasars seen by astronomers, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. (AP Photo/European Southern Observatory/L.Calcada)