Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary | 2018 Sep 05
Galactic nuclei are teeming with black holes. Earlier this year, 12 X-ray binaries were discovered at the Milky Way’s center which suggested that thousands of black holes may be hiding in that region. A recent study shows that these stellar black holes are expected to orbit in a disk around the central supermassive black hole.
Observations show that the centers of most galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole. The immense gravity of these objects acts to collect a dense population of millions of stars and several thousands of stellar mass black holes within a few light years. Astrophysicists simulated the interactions of stellar orbits in these regions and found that the black holes settle in previously unexpected structures. The results show that the more massive objects of the stellar population form a thick disk structure around the supermassive black hole in galactic nuclei.
“Previously it was thought that the orbits of both light and massive stellar objects are distributed isotropically around the supermassive black hole. We now understand that massive stars and black holes typically segregate into a disk,” said Ákos Szölgyén ...
Black Hole Disks in Galactic Nuclei ~ Ákos Szölgyén, Bence Kocsis
- Physical Review Letters 121(10):1101 (07 Sep 2018) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.101101
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1803.07090 > 19 Mar 2018 (v1), 05 Sep 2018 (v2)