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Monster of a mystery
Monster of a mysteryFeb. 25: Astronomers today announced their discovery of a black hole so ancient and so massive that they are calling it a "monster" whose existence they cannot explain through their current theories of how these objects form.
An international team of astronomers has identified a black hole with a mass about 12 billion times that of the sun and from a time when the universe was only 875 million years old. They are baffled because existing theories of how black holes build up mass cannot explain how such a massive object could have formed in such a short time after the birth of the universe through the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago.
"This object is surprising because it would have needed to grow very fast - and we cannot explain how that happened," Fuyan Bian, a member of the team at the Australian National University told The Telegraph on phone.
While supermassive black holes are commonly found at the centre of every large galaxy, the astronomers say their discovery poses a "significant challenge" to limits on the growth rate of black holes based on ideas of the 20th century British astronomer-physicist, Arthur Eddington.
A black hole is a remnant of a massive star that has exhausted its fuel and collapsed into an object with such a strong gravitational field that not even light can escape it. As matter falls into a black hole, it emits intense radiation that pushes away more matter falling into it.
"This radiation pressure imposes a limit on how fast a black hole can build mass," Bian said.
The black hole powers what the astronomers say is the most luminous of quasars observed yet. Quasars, first discovered in the 1960s, are central regions of a galaxy with supermassive black holes at their centres.
"This quasar is unique," Xue-Bing Wu, an astronomer at Peking University, Beijing, said in a media release issued by a participating observatory at the University of Arizona. "Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us probe more about the early universe." The team relied on a network of telescopes in Chile, China, Arizona, Hawaii to observe the quasar first spotted in December 2013.
Astronomers have over the decades <>documented over 510,000 quasars and, until now, the most massive black holes at galactic centres had masses of about 10 billion solar masses. But none is as old or as massive as this one.
Team members say the quasar raises several questions. "How can supermassive black holes grow so quickly when the universe was so young? And what is the relationship between this monster black hole and its host galaxy?" said Xiaohui Fan at the University of Arizona.
