"When material falls into these black holes, tens of percents of the matter can be released as energy," explained theoretical physicist Avi Loeb Harvard University at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This is much more than the one percent or so of mass that is converted into energy inside stars by way of nuclear fusion — the engine that makes all stars shine.
Luckily for us in the Milky Way, the gas-blasting scream of doomed matter only happens when the monster is feeding, which is not the case for the two to four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Just how this all fits into the making of the universe on a larger scale is exactly what Di Matteo and her colleagues are trying to discover with the simulation.
"It's putting things into a bigger context," said Loeb. A good human analogy, he says, is how sociologists put a family into a larger context to study all of society. Any given family may be small, but how they function has profound implications for society at large.
The same may go for super-massive black holes in the larger universe, he said.
To make the new simulation of the universe, called BH Cosmo, the researchers used all 2,000 processors of the Cray XT3 supercomputer and crunched equations for four weeks.
Di Matteo and her colleagues Jorg Colberg, Volker Springel, Debora Sijacki and Lars Hernquist will be publishing the results of their simulation in Astrophysical Journal.
