Monster in the nursery
Scientists have recently discovered an ancient supermassive black hole that existed so early in the history of the universe that it will give a new perspective to the cosmic environment in which the first stars came to life. The farthest black hole ever seen, astronomers found it inside a bright object so long that its light had to travel for 13 billion years to reach our telescopes.
The magnificent black hole is estimated to be 800 million times the mass of our sun. Astronomers, including Rob Simcoe, an astronaut at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are undeveloped as to how such a monster could have been so early in cosmic history; just 690 million years after the Great Bang, when the cosmos was only 5 percent of its present age.
“As we looked further back in time we expected the black holes to become smaller and smaller because they didn’t have as much time to grow,” said Simcoe, one of the authors of the research that emerged there Nature, said to NPR. “What was surprising here was that this one seemed to have been created in its entirety even though the universe was very young at this time,” he said.
Black hole out of time
In particular, Simcoe explained, this elegant black hole seems to have originated in an environment that had only just begun under the influence of the light of the first stars.
“The time when the first stars turned was when our universe filled with light,” said Simcoe. NPR, by further explaining that the original light sources in the universe altered the properties of a subject in the first galleries. “We now estimate, with one to two per cent accuracy, for the moment that the light of the world first shone. ”
This is important because it will help our understanding of a time when the universe did not begin to produce more complex chemicals than hydrogen and helium, a nuclear meltdown moving down the seasonal chart.
Originally discovered by Eduardo Bañados of the Carnegie Institution of Science Observatory, Simcoe credits it for “finding that needle in the stack. ”