The paper detailing the new find was published April 13 in Nature. It sits at the core of a dusty galaxy exploding with star formation, also known as a starburst galaxy. Lurking within the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-N) field, the black hole existed only some 750 million years after the Big Bang. While sifting through archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers uncovered GNz7q. Now, a new object, hidden within one of the best-studied areas of the night sky, may just hold the missing link to the evolution of black holes that scientists have been searching for. Yet, astronomers have spotted supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang, leaving them scratching their heads. And, because there is a limit to how much material they can consume in a single sitting, it should take a really long time for them to devour enough to grow to such epic proportions. Ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, these titans reside in the heart of most galaxies. One of the biggest lingering conundrums is how supermassive black holes grew to be so large so fast in the early universe.
It's no wonder so much about these alluring monsters remains a mystery. And then another 48 years before scientists managed to capture the first image of a black hole. It took another five years for astronomers to actually discover the first black hole. But these so-called “frozen stars” weren’t coined black holes until 1967. Einstein first predicted them when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916. Black holes, while prevalent in the spacefaring adventures of sci-fi, are a relatively new find for astronomers.
0 kommentar(er)
