“They have an enormous mass, even comparable to the mass of some galaxies like the small Magellanic Cloud. They are black, because not even the light can escape from its gravity and if you fall inside you will never return ”, explains Andrés Escala, astronomer of the University of Chile. The origin of these entities, those that have a mass of millions of times that of the sun and are usually located at the center of galaxies, would be closer and closer to being discovered thanks to this so-called" ‘Made in Chile‘ discovery.

This work shows that the formation of supermassive black holes, which inhabit the center of galaxies, lies in the instability of this area, where the stars tend to collide violently with each other ”, explains the researcher of the Center for Excellence in Astrophysics and Related Technologies (CATA).

The key is in the center, the quality goes inside

Nuclear stellar clusters are huge agglomerations of stars that laids in the central zone of the galaxies, representing a great mass from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of times that of our sun, but "from a certain density that is determined in this work, they become very unstable, the stars that compose this environment begin to collide violently with each other and the system collapses forming a black hole ", indicates the Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale University and with a post-doctorate from Stanford University, both in the United States.

The paper proposes that massive black holes would have formed from failed clusters, "thanks to this effort we have the first indicator of the formation of a supermassive black hole." Escala adds that the work took almost two years of developing, performing mathematical calculations contrasted with previously published observational data, which is related to the work of the group of scientists that won the Núcleo Milenio Titanes.

Now, the scientist hopes to do the computational simulations to support part of the results. "We already have a master‘s student from the Department of Astronomy of the University of Concepción carrying out this operation in the context of the Núcleo Milenio Titanes and probably, in March another graduate student will start working with us at the University of Chile."

The results of this work is published at "The Astrophysical Journal" in the article "Observational Support for Massive Black Hole Formation Driven by Runaway Stellar Collisions in Galactic Nuclei", to see the research go to the following web link