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12-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole Discovered 139

sciencehabit writes: A team of astronomers has discovered what is, in galactic terms, a monstrous baby: a gigantic black hole of 12 billion solar masses in a barely newborn galaxy, just 875 million years after the big bang. It's roughly 3000 times the size of our Milky Way's central black hole. To have grown to such a size in so short a time, it must have been munching matter at close to the maximum physically possible rate for most of its existence. Its large size and rate of consumption also makes it the brightest object in that distant era, and astronomers can use its bright light to study the composition of the early universe: how much of the original hydrogen and helium from the big bang had been forged into heavier elements in the furnaces of stars.
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12-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole Discovered

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  • Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Thursday February 26, 2015 @10:10AM (#49136939)

    Supermassive black holes have a different origin than stellar black holes

    Anyway how big is it now (if it was 12 billion solar masses 12 billion years ago it must be pretty big now. Does this account for the missing dark matter?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Don't get too excited. 12 billion solar masses doesn't mean much. Billion is 10^9th. The Milky Way's solar mass is about 1.1 10^12th. And the Milky Way isn't that big of a deal on the galactic scale of things.

  • by chadkennedyonline ( 1283278 ) on Thursday February 26, 2015 @10:23AM (#49137057)
    Our galaxy is 1000 billion suns in mass. So this guy is 1.2% the mass of our entire galaxy. That's huge. By comparison, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is 4 million suns in mass.
  • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Thursday February 26, 2015 @10:26AM (#49137135) Homepage

    I did not realise that bankers were around as early as 875 million years after the big bang.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's not a banker, that enormous black hole is your mom!

  • "...munching matter at close to the maximum physically possible rate for most of it's existence." One of their physicists must be really good at yo momma jokes.
    • by Rashdot ( 845549 )

      Reading that sentence I thought: "hey, I know where that black hole lives!"

      Also it's its, not it's.

  • Yes it is true if you assume things like the material is gas, it has random slow motion initially, etc. Then yes you can derive an upper limit based on the balance of radiation pressure and gravity. For special cases unlikely to happen in reality, such as artificial configurations of matter or thought experiment cases, this upper limit is much higher. For example if you fed a black hole neutrinos how would they significantly heat and spread compared to gas? They would not and you could feed a black hol
  • by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Thursday February 26, 2015 @11:08AM (#49137565)

    My theory is that space expanded differently inside the black hole and that the difference influences our calculations, significantly reducing the needed ingested mass.

    Yes, I will mention Slashdot when they give me the Nobel price for that.

  • by ballpoint ( 192660 ) on Thursday February 26, 2015 @12:46PM (#49138607)

    12-Billion-Dollar-Mass Black Hole Discovered

  • So if there is one, either there is a substantial asymmetry or there should be many, following a reasonable distribution curve. If there were many, uniformly distributed, then there should be at least some well inside of the 13 gigaLY sphere (where this one is on the periphery). If there are some inside of this sphere, obviously they stopped "munching stars" and being bright at some point, probably some point before 13 billion years ago. Therefore we can conclude that either:

    a) There are an unknown numb

  • That's big but it's not Euro-Billion big! Now that would be 10^12 huge!
  • Is it's event horizon gaining on us?

  • It doesn't even come close to this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org] It has a mass thousands of times our entire galaxy, which has over 200 billion stars.
  • Doesn't seem to be in any of 3 TFAs
  • Side effect of all those AOL disks

  • So, about the same as Michael Moore then? Not as much super heated rhetoric probably though.
  • I assume the pressure and densities of matter around a black hole's accretion disk are at least as high as those in the center of stars that form into black holes. So would it be right to conclude that new singularities are created around an active black hole's accretion disk all the time?

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