Baby Universe Spawned Weirdly Monstrous Black Hole

Astronomers have discovered an out-of-place supermassive black hole -- 12 billion times more massive than the sun -- that inexplicably formed when the universe was less than 900 million years old.

Such behemoths are typically found in the more modern universe, which presumably offers more feeding material. Black holes are regions of space so dense with matter that not even photons of light can escape their gravitational fists. They are detected as they pull and consume nearby stars and dust, creating a cosmic zoo of detectable phenomenon, such gas jets and rapidly spinning accretion disks.

“Before this discovery the most massive black hole known within 1 billion years after the Big Bang was around 5 billion solar mass, less than half the mass of the new detection,” Bram Venemans, research staff scientist with Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

The discovery, reported in this week’s Nature, presents a serious challenge to theories about how black holes grew in the early universe.

Scientists previously estimated young black holes started off with between 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the sun and grew from there by sucking in interstellar matter and/or merging with other black holes.

“It may require either very special ways to grow the black hole within a very short time, or the existence of a huge seed black hole when the first generation of stars and galaxies formed,” lead researcher Xue-Bing Wu, with China’s Peking University in Beijing, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Neither explanation fits with current theories.

“A very interesting aspect of this work is that the results hint that in the early universe the supermassive black holes and their host galaxies did not co-evolve,” said astronomer Akos Bogdan, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the research.

It is unlikely the black hole’s host galaxy would be as big as what calculations based on current theories would conclude. “This would suggest that -- at least in this case -- the black hole is growing faster than the galaxy, questioning the often assumed co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes through cosmic time,” added Venemans.

The newly found black hole resides in an extremely bright quasar that existed when the universe was about 857 million years old – about 6 percent of the universe’s current 13.8-billion-year age.

Read more at Discovery News