Alex Sicilia has developped a new computational approach to study the demography of stellar-mass black holes, black holes that have masses between a few solar masses and a few hundred solar masses and that are born on the death of massive stars.
“The innovative character of this work lies in the coupling of a detailed model of stellar and binary evolution with advanced research for star formation and metal enrichment in individual galaxies. This is one of the earliest and most robust ab initio calculations of the stellar black hole mass function throughout cosmic history.“, explains Alex Sicilia, in a press release.
With this new approach, Alex Sicilia was able to calculate the number of black holes in the observable Universe at present (a sphere with a diameter of regarding 90 billion light-years): regarding 40 billion billion (just that).
