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Why Are Supermassive Black Holes Growing So Slowly?

April 02, 2026
Why Are Supermassive Black Holes Growing So Slowly?
By Evan Gough (https://ift.tt/6JVX5qG)

Astronomers studied more than 1 million galaxies and more than 8,000 growing supermassive black holes (SMBH) over billions of years to try to answer a difficult question. During Cosmic Noon about 10 billion years ago, the growth of SMBH began to slow dramatically. The image on the left represents one of the rapidly-growing SMBH in the past, and the image on the right represents a slower-growing SMBH about 3 billion light-years away. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./Z. Yu; Optical (HST): NASA/ESA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds, L. Frattare

About 10 billion years ago, the growth rate of supermassive black holes began to slow dramatically. To this day, the SMBH growth rate still appears to be low. There are three potential explanations for this, and researchers think they've figured out which explanation fits best.



April 2, 2026 at 11:32PM
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