New evidence suggests that quasars may be a source of star formation in the earlier universe, spitting out grains of glass, gems, sand, and marble with the particle wind from the supermassive black holes in their centers. Interestingly enough, the particle wind blows out more matter than the black hole takes in, forcing an analogy I would have come up with:
"Quasars are like the Cookie Monster," said study team member Sarah Gallagher of the University of California, Los Angeles. "They can consume less matter than they can spit out in the form of winds."
Q is for Quasar, and that's good enough for me!
Wow. Really, just wow.
ReplyDeleteAre there any current theories that would help to explain how there can be more dust created, than material taken in?
It has to come from somewhere...
Brenda:
ReplyDeleteO Hai!
What it means for quasars blowing out more material than it gravitationally attracts, is that the quasar itself slowly fades away, until nothing but super massive black hole is left. How long this takes is what the researchers need to find out. It's probably on the order of 5 billion years or so, since we don't see anymore "local" quasars in our galaxy cluster. And the massive black hole would probably be much smaller now because of billions of years of Hawking radiation slowly "melting" it away.
Oh, ok. That makes sense.
ReplyDelete(But, was hoping for a strange quark kind of explanation.)