Scientists always believed that there are an innumerable number of black holes in the universe, but a new study has just put a number on it. Black holes continue to fascinate astrophysicists everywhere, but researchers have never tried to put a number on how many there might be in the entirety of the universe. However, researchers now believe they know how many stellar black holes they are dealing with, and it's an absurd number.

Black holes are regions of spacetime that are so dense and their gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light. It makes them difficult to spot with cameras and can only be detected by watching the motion of nearby stars or when surrounding material, such as gas and dust, are funneled by gravity into a disk around them.

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A new study by the SISSA Ph.D. student Alex Sicilia, supervised by Prof. Andrea Lapi and Dr. Lumen Boco, together with other international collaborators, has come to the conclusion that there are around 40 trillions, 40 billion billions of stellar mass black holes in the observable universe. That's 4 followed by 19 zeros, which is a mind-boggling number that most folks don't encounter on a regular basis, if ever. The paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal, further says that in the course of their investigation into stellar-mass black holes, the researchers found that they account for around 1 percent of all the ordinary, or 'baryonic' matter.

New Computational Approach To Calculating Black Holes

The researchers used a new computational approach to calculate the total number of black holes by using the stellar and binary evolution code SEVN developed by SISSA researcher Dr. Mario Spera. To calculate the number, the team combined models of how single and binary star pairs evolve, and how many turn into black holes. According to the team, the findings will help researchers better understand how stellar- and intermediate-mass black holes might evolve into supermassive black holes. It is worth noting that the research calculates only the number of stellar-mass black holes and that too, not in the entire universe, but in the 'observable' region only.

Another issue investigated by the researchers was the various "formation channels for black holes of different masses, like isolated stars, binary systems, and stellar clusters." For this study, the researchers teamed up with Dr. Ugo Di Carlo and Prof. Michela Mapelli from University of Padova. According to the research, the largest stellar-mass black holes are typically created by colliding smaller black holes within stellar clusters. The theory is in line with the available observational gravitational wave data on black hole collisions. With the initial paper now published, the researchers are now looking to calculate the number of intermediate-mass black holes and supermassive black holes in the future.

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Source: The Astrophysical Journal