25 February 2016
Belinda Smith
Belinda Smith is a science and technology journalist in Melbourne, Australia.
Supermassive black holes are responsible for banishing almost a fifth of "normal" matter into intergalactic voids, computer modelling suggests.
A group of astronomers in Europe and the US simulated the vast voids of space, and calculated they might contain as much as 20% of the normal matter in the Universe.
The culprits? Supermassive black holes that live in the centre of galaxies.
The team, led by Markus Haider of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, published their cosmic simulations in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
We live in a Universe dominated by unseen matter: only around 5% of it is "normal" – that is, made of atoms – with the rest being dark matter and dark energy.
Matter isn't spread evenly through the Universe. Galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into a "cosmic web": filaments millions of light-years long that stretch around the edge of enormous voids.
These voids comprise around 80% of the Universe's volume.
Haider and his colleagues probed the web using data from the Illustris project, a supercomputer simulation of galactic formation and evolution, to measure how much mass is retained in the filaments and how much has spilt into the voids.
(The largest Illustris simulation was run on 8,192 computer cores, and took 19 million processing hours – the equivalent of one computer running for around 2,000 years.)
Dark matter, shown in the top image above, is neatly concentrated in the filaments. But normal matter is a different story – it's "fluffier", with around a fifth found in the enormous voids.
Haider thinks supermassive black holes are the exilers. As matter falls into a supermassive black hole, some of it is converted to energy.
This energy shoots out into the surrounding gas and thrusts it hundreds of thousands of light-years away from the black hole, farther than the border of its host galaxy.
Dark matter, on the other hand, is impervious to the blasts, and stays neatly in its filaments.
“This simulation, one of the most sophisticated ever run, suggests that the black holes at the centre of every galaxy are helping to send matter into the loneliest places in the Universe," Haider says.
The team plans to run new simulations with Illustris to confirm and refine their model, and say these should be available in a few months.