Giant Black Hole Discovery Surprises Scientists

According to a paper from the journal Nature, astronomers have identified a giant black hole weighing as much as 12 billion suns.

It is only 875 million years after the big bang. CBS reported:

“Many astronomers didn’t expect something so massive could exist so early in the universe,” Xiaohui Fan, of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, and a co-author on the study of the discovery reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, told CBS News.

“Black holes take time to grow,” he said. “It starts from a seed and grows over time. Then slowly, over time it accrues material to make it bigger and bigger. This is one is a giant but more like a baby in age.”

At the center of this black hole was the quasar, a bright cloud that represents all the material being gobbled up. Named SDSS J0100+2802, the quasar was about 420 trillion times brighter than the sun. The National Geographic reported:

The quasar’s extraordinary brightness tells the astronomers just how powerfully gas is being heated, which in turn tells them how astonishingly massive the underlying black hole is. “We’ve seen other quasars from this period,” says Wu, “but none of them has a mass of more than three billion times that of the sun.”

The black hole was discovered by a team of global scientists led by Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, China, as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provided imagery data of 35 percent of the northern hemisphere sky.

Illustration by Zhaoyu Li, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory