Black holes and the formation of stars

Now Ian Bonnell, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and William Ken Rice of the University of Edinburgh have created a computer simulation that offers a possible explanation for how the stars could have formed. They detailed their model in the Aug. 22 issue of the journal Science.

In their model, a giant gas cloud plunges in toward the black hole. As it gets close, much of the cloud is ripped apart by the black hole's gravity, though some portion of it survives because of the turbulence of the gas in the cloud.

This remnant forms an oval disk of gas orbiting around the black hole, gravitationally bound but beyond the range within which it would be sucked in. Variations in the density of the material in the disk then cause it to condense into stars and break up, leaving the stars in an oval orbit around the black hole where the disk used to be.

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