In a extragalactic nebula far , far away—12.8 billion calorie-free - years out to be more exact — is anewly - discovered supermassive black holethat weighs as much as 12 billion of our suns . The most surprising affair about the smuggled hole , though , is not its size but its age .
fatal hole grow as they age , gobble up gaseous state and stars that foolishly hazard too closemouthed . uranologist have find more massive black holes before , but this one is amazingly new . Because it is so far away , we “ see ” the inglorious hole as it was 12.8 billion years ago , or only about 875 million years after the Big Bang . Astronomers are puzzled how this black hole grow so huge in so brusque a time .
The geezerhood of this new black hole does n’t square with existing theories of smuggled hole constitution , but uranologist do volunteer up some alternative . Perhaps early stars that collapsed into black holes were big than we thought , or perhaps two black holes merged into one . National Geographic has more detailsabout the nascence of black holes .
Astronomers found this black hole by detecting light from the quasar that surrounds it . A quasar is made up of the material twirl around a black hole that has not yet fallen in ; as the stuff accelerates , it gets spicy and emits tripping . This quasi-stellar radio source is the brightest — and its fateful yap the biggest — found in the other universe . It ’s 40,000 times as luminous as the full Milky elbow room .
Yet it is so far away that it is but a tiny pinprick of Light Within on our most sinewy telescopes . [ National Geographic , Nature ]
Top image : Zhaoyu Li / Shanghai Astronomical Observatory
AstronomyBlack holesSpace
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