Astronomers find a shockingly ancient black hole the size of 12 billion suns

[jakeXT]

Some 12.8 billion light years away, astronomers have spotted an object of almost impossible brightness — the most luminous object ever seen in such ancient space. It's from just 900 million years after the big bang, and the old quasar — a shining object produced by a massive black hole — is 420 trillion times more luminous than our sun.

That brightness and size is surprising in a black hole from so close to the dawn of time. In a new study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers describe a cosmic light that defies convention. It was even detectable with a relatively small telescope, though researchers in China did have to ask for help from astronomers in Chile and the United States to get a higher-resolution look.

"How could we have this massive black hole when the universe was so young? We don't currently have a satisfactory theory to explain it," said lead author Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University and the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

For the black hole to grow to such a staggering size in less than a billion years, the astronomers posit, it must have been pulling in interstellar mass from its surroundings at the maximum rate the whole time. Even so, the radiation of the quasar formed by the black hole should have started to limit that mass accumulation before such a size was reached.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/02/25/astronomers-find-a-shockingly-ancient-black-hole-the-size-of-12-billion-suns/

[Laffy Kat]

1. You know, when scientists speak in those terms...

I can't even begin to wrap my head around the concept. How does one visualize the size of 12 billion suns? It's so fantastic it boggles the mind.

[Fumesucker]

8. If I have it right the Scwarzchild radius of that black hole is 10 X bigger than Neptune's orbit

3.54 e +10 km = radius of black hole

4.49 e +9 km = radius of Neptune's orbit

[MannyGoldstein]

9. No credit unless you show your work

[Fumesucker]

12. Try it yourself..

http://physics.unl.edu/~klee/flash_astro/bhole_sim010.swf

[MannyGoldstein]

13. I'm on a Flashless device

But I assume it's a Schwarzchild-radius calculator? How do we know that Putin didn't put a phony calculator there to mess us up back when Dim Son announced his intention to land a man on a black hole before godless terrorists do?

[Fumesucker]

15. Has anyone ever told you that you are weird?

Well, if they haven't then let me be the first..

But I mean that in a good way..

[Laffy Kat]

19. Oh, thanks. That clears it up.

[Fumesucker]

20. Theoretically the black hole itself is a mathematical point, no size at all...

Even twelve billion solar masses worth.

The Schwarzchild radius is the point beyond which if you go any closer even light can't escape, the escape velocity exceeds that of light. Since light cannot escape then it is impossible to directly observe a black hole, we can only see the effects it has on things around it.

So if you get closer to this ultramassive black hole than about twice Neptune's orbit it is theoretically impossible to get away again, no matter how powerful your rocket may be.

Of course you would be blasted by radiation and torn apart by gravitational fields long before you get to that point but that's what Schwarzchild radius means.

[cstanleytech]

18. Ya but I think the article might be wrong as its not the size of 12 billion suns but rather the mass

of 12 billion suns.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

2. Lots of head scratching

not so smooth of a start as thought

[Fred Sanders]

3. Supermassive Black Hole | Muse- Live

[shenmue]

4. Mind hurts

[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]

[Beartracks]

5. A black hole is most luminous object... Irony?

I need to go read up on this stuff again. I've never understood how something with such strong gravity that not even LIGHT can escape it can eventually get so big/dense as to start... emitting its own light.

========================

[MannyGoldstein]

7. I'm guessing lots of energy released due to intense gravitational fields

outside of the event horizon.

[Treant]

10. Accretion Disk

It's where infalling gas gets pulled around the hole, rubs against other gas that's already there, and heats up.

Even on modest basic black holes the accretion disk material can fire out X-rays without half trying. This one must be firing extremely hard gamma rays.

Like any other black body, what you'd see if you had been there is deceptive. Human visual range stinks, so we only see the visible light emitted (in the billionth of a second you'd last before being blasted to your constituent particles by the radiation, of course).

[MannyGoldstein]

6. I guess our Universe is even lumpier than we thought.

Last edited Thu Feb 26, 2015, 12:16 AM - Edit history (1)

Like my mattress. Maybe a black hole is causing that nasty spot in the middle.

When I dispose of my mattress, I should probably STFU about the black hole possibility, there might be an extra fee.

[Mnpaul]

11. You may want to wait it out

If that black hole in your mattress gets large enough, you won't need to get rid of it.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

14. Assuming the black hole was constructed from matter from our universe....

Maybe it's a phenomenon of the rift between our current reality and what came before and these massive ones are SHRINKING as they slip away into a dimension best described as oblivion.

[Man from Pickens]

16. More likely to be misinterpreted redshift

It's been proven that there are possible causes of redshift other than simple velocity, but the scientific establishment hasn't caught up with it yet. Much more likely that they are wrong about redshift than such massive objects existing long before they had time to form according to standard model theory.

[Unknown Beatle]

17. Well Stephen Hawking said black holes

don't exist the way we understood them for the last 40 years based on general relativity. So I wonder if the scientists finding this massive black hole are taking Hawking's quantum theory on black holes into account.

[lastlib]

21. Okay, everybody, recess is over!

Time to go back inside and color. Stay inside the lines.

[Judi Lynn]

22. Young Black Hole Had Monstrous Growth Spurt

Young Black Hole Had Monstrous Growth Spurt

Super-massive object found in the early universe tests theories of cosmic evolution

February 26, 2015 |By Davide Castelvecchi and Nature magazine

A black hole that grew to gargantuan size in the Universe's first billion years is by far the largest yet spotted from such an early date, researchers have announced. The object, discovered by astronomers in 2013, is 12 billion times as massive as the Sun, and six times greater than its largest-known contemporaries. Its existence poses a challenge for theories of the evolution of black holes, stars and galaxies, astronomers say.

Light from the black hole took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, so astronomers see the object as it was 900 million years after the Big Bang. That “is actually a very short time” for a black hole to have grown so large, says astronomer Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University in Beijing. He led an international collaboration that describes the discovery in Nature.

For its age, this black hole “is really much more massive than anything else we have seen so far”, says Christian Veillet, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Light sink
Wu and his colleagues spotted the black hole using the Lijiang Telescope in Yunnan, China. The object appeared as a bright, red, point-like source. The brightness and spectrum of its light revealed it to be an ancient quasar: a large black hole that occupies the centre of a galaxy and causes interstellar gas to overheat and shine brighter than any star as it spirals into the hole's gravitational sink.

The team analysed the quasar's spectrum in more detail—an effort that eventually involved four larger telescopes around the world—to estimate the velocity of the infalling gas. This revealed the strength of the object’s gravity, and hence its unusually large mass.

More:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/young-black-hole-had-monstrous-growth-spurt1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciam%2Fspace+%28Topic%3A+Space%29

[Ichingcarpenter]

23. They have just named it according to Xue-Bing Wu in honor

of largest black hole on earth but are having trouble deciding on calling it either.......... Billo............... the pentagon .......... or after my x wife.