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BailysmmmCreamy t1_jdy089s wrote

Reply to comment by jaibhavaya in Are galaxies just giant accretion disks around super massive black holes? by darthvadercock

Almost certainly not a coincidence, but we don’t know whether the supermassive black holes are the ‘seed’ of the galaxy or whether the galaxy formed first and the stuff in the center collapsed into the black hole.

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Kenshkrix t1_jdyapre wrote

I lean towards the "seed" idea, because black hole formation and growth as we understand it requires that supermassive black holes had to form already extremely massive relative to an 'ordinary' black hole.

A sufficiently energetic collapse to cause a supermassive black hole straight out is extremely unlikely to occur if things are already in any kind of orbit.

We still don't really know, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless.

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jaibhavaya t1_jdz01j3 wrote

I guess that makes sense… if matter wasn’t already coalescing, then what would have collapsed to create the initial black hole? The black hole forms an accretion disk, then the accretion disk pulls other matter into orbit… and suddenly you have a galaxy? So really the “rest” of the galaxy ends up orbiting around its collective center of gravity, that just so happens to be close to the center of this initial big ol’ black hole.

Or something like that? I read that on the underside of a Snapple cap.

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Kenshkrix t1_jdzvo4k wrote

The main issue with black holes is that you can't feed them too much stuff at once unless it falls directly into them, which won't happen in a galactic environment since everything has orbital momentum.

Once a black hole has an accretion disk, the disk itself has so much energy that it will shove away extra matter trying to fall into it.

Thus, one theory on the formation of supermassive black holes is the "black hole star".

Put simply, the idea is that in the early universe in areas where there weren't any particularly big things or galaxies it would be possible for light years worth of diffuse gas to begin accelerating towards the same area, which could collapse directly into a singularity.

It would still have enormous amounts of gas falling towards it, though, and the sheer gravity of all this gas could overcome the energy emitted by the relativistic accretion disk and continue to grow the black hole at a prodigious rate.

Eventually the balance would break and it would explode, but most of the remaining gas might not reach escape velocity, this would be the "seed" of a potential galaxy.

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