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For the first time using a newly unleashed computational approach, researchers at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA or Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) have been able to make an amazing calculation. These astrophysicists while NASA technicians are still orienting the mirrors of the new James Webb Space Telescope have determined how many black holes there are in the universe… and suffice it to say they’re going to keep the James Webb and the Hubble busy for quite a while. According to the work of the SISSA researchers approximately 1% of all ordinary or baryonic matter is currently locked in the stellar mass of black holes. So based on the math… that’s an astounding 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 (40 quintillion) black holes!
According to HotHardware,
“The paper is a first in what the scientists refer to as, “a series aimed at modeling the black hole (BH) mass function, from the stellar to the intermediate to the (super)massive regime.” The first paper explains how the team calculated its estimate of stellar black holes, those with masses 5 to 10 times that of our Sun, in the universe.
This may seem like a number that is impossible to estimate, being that black holes are not the easiest celestial objects to spot. This is because they are as dark as the space that surrounds them. Black holes can typically only be seen under extreme circumstances, such as when they are bending light around them, consuming the unlucky gases and stars that come too close, or meandering toward collisions that emit gravitational waves.”
Easy as pie right?
Alex Sicilia, an astrophysicist at SISSA, and one of the paper’s authors explained, “The innovative character of this work is in the coupling of a detailed model of stellar and binary evolution with advanced recipes for star formation and metal enrichment in individual galaxies.” He continued, “This is one of the first, and one of the most robust, ab initio (ground up) computation(s) of the stellar black hole mass function across cosmic history.”
The team also explained that they are investigating how black holes of varying sizes may form. Naturally, not all of the black holes they’ve calculated for are going to be the supermassive kind at the center of galaxies, they can be of every size down to the incredibly tiny. It’s incredible what a little math can do isn’t it?
