Short Description: How many black holes are there in universe? Researchers may have an answer for it!
How many black holes are there in universe? Researchers may have an answer for it!
Trieste [Italy], February 1 : One of the most relevant and pressing questions in modern astrophysics and cosmology is: "How many black holes are out there in the Universe?" A recent study by the Italian research institute, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), has shed some light on this.
In the first paper of a series just published in 'The Astrophysical Journal', the authors have investigated the demographics of stellar-mass black holes, which are black holes with masses between a few to some hundred solar masses, that originated at the end of the life of massive stars.
The paper was led by the SISSA PhD student Alex Sicilia, supervised by Prof. Andrea Lapi and Dr Lumen Boco, together with other collaborators from SISSA and from other national and international institutions.
According to the new research, a remarkable amount around 1 per cent of the overall ordinary (baryonic) matter of the Universe has been locked up in stellar-mass black holes. Astonishingly, the researchers have found that the number of black holes within the observable Universe at present time is about 40 x 1018 (i.e., 4 followed by 19 zeros!).
As the authors of the research explained: "This important result has been obtained thanks to an original approach which combines the state-of-the-art stellar and binary evolution code SEVN developed by SISSA researcher Dr Mario Spera to empirical prescriptions for relevant physical properties of galaxies, especially the rate of star formation, the amount of stellar mass and the metallicity of the interstellar medium (which are all important elements to define the number and the masses of stellar black holes)."
( Details and picture courtesy ANI, the content is auto-generated from the feed.)
Please follow us on Telegram for all the latest updates.
