Most spiral galaxies in the universe such as our very own Milky Way galaxy host a supermassive black hole in its core, which is estimated to possess more than a million solar masses, or a million times bigger than our sun, however it still has been a mystery how these colossal cosmic entities emerged in the first place.

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Some say that black holes first came into existence when it began sucking in clusters of gas from their surrounding areas in a galaxy. Another theory is that it attracted smaller black holes and eventually merged together.

For this new discovery, three of the world's largest space telescopes have gathered data and now suggest that there is a third driving force that generates black holes, involving collapsing gas clouds. According to Fabio Pacucci from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy, there is new evidence that supermassive black holes can directly sprout from a collapse of a gigantic gas cloud which can skip any more steps to emerge as a fully formed black hole.

According to Andrea Ferrara who is also from the Scuola Normale Superiore, there has been enough controversy how black holes take steps to form into a supermassive one, and this new study suggests that we are now closing in on the answer, as black holes begin to grow big at a normal rate as opposed to forming small and then growing at a rapid rate.

Now, new data are analyzed to form computer simulations courtesy of NASA's Hubble, Chandra X-ray and Spitzer space telescopes as astronomers detected two ideal candidates for these black hole "seeds" that are matched with predictions revealing a red color, seen by Hubble and Spitzer, including the X-ray profile from Chandra's prediction.

Apart from these, measurements obtained regarding distance also indicate that these black holes have formed when the universe was just under a billion years old, where all of this data was taken from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-South surveys.

NASA's next step would be to collect more data from these two possible candidates and extend this in depth analysis for more direct collapse black hole candidates. This new study will be published in the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

TagsBlack Holes, supermassive black holes, how black holes form, Universe, NASA, chandra, spitzer, hubble