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The latest and also the largest black hole discovery that researchers have ever made has just been identified by scientists from Australia and China. Its birthday is somewhere at the beginning of time, which means that it has been existing since the very first days of the universe.
In comparison with the Sun from our solar system, this black hole was 12 million times bigger than the Sun’s mass and in a quasar that was a million billion times as energetic as the Sun. Dr Fuyan Bian from the ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics presents what is the issue with this black hole, from his point of view. He states that forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with the current theories.
The measurements are astonishing to scientists: the black hole has a redshift of greater than 6.30, and the quasar, designated SDSSJ010013.021280225.8 (SDSS J0100+2802 in short) is one of only around 40 with that redshift. In addition, the age of the quasar is estimated to be less than a billion years old, but that’s not very young in any possible universe. Dr. Bian believes that the giant size and age may mean that the black hole has “gained enormous mass in a short period of time”, but the theory doesn’t fit any of the existent ones; the quasar couldn’t possibly grow in such a short period of time.
The researchers have written to Nature that there have been found before some black holes that have a similar size, but they were in “local giant elliptical galaxies and low-redshift quasars”.
A possible explanation could be that the black hole gets hotter while the material slides into it, creating a very big amount of light, making the quasar become part of the “superluminous” category. Taking into consideration the logics and the chronology of the matter,the rate of grows of the black hole should have stopped.
Christian Veillet, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Tucson, Arizona has said that:
“ [For its age, this black hole] is really much more massive than anything else we have seen so far.”
Chris Willott, an astronomer at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre in Victoria has come up with the theory saying that the birth of such a black hole couldn’t happen just because a single star has collapsed, but because a very large gas cloud did so. However, more observations and investigations have to be made, and the scientists are willing to use the Hubble Space Telescope for this purpose.
Image Source: I-Space
