. An international group of scientists discovered a hypermassive blackhole 12.8billion light years away from Earth. It contains 12 billions times the Sun’s mass, and 420 trillions times its luminosity. This black hole is so large that the theories about how black holes form have been rewritten. It is 12.8billion light years from Earth, meaning it was 900million years before the Big Bang that gave rise to our Universe. It is not clear how the universe became so large so fast, so shortly after galaxies and stars were created. This new celestial object has been named SDSS J 0100+2802, and is located at the centre of a quasar. Quasars can be found far away from the galaxy. These bright masses are full of energy and light. Quasar stands for quasi-stellar radio source or quasi-stellar object. The journal Nature has published details about the discovery (citation below). Artist’s impression showing a distant and very old quasar. Credit to the European Southern Observatory. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser They are thought to be produced by matter heated up and pulled into the centers of distant galaxies. Thanks to new technology (new generation of digital sky surveys), more than 200,000 quasars have been discovered, ranging in age from 0.7 billion years after the Big Bang to today. The redshift at which this quasar was discovered was z=6 .30.. It is the measurement of the extent to which the wavelength of light it emits that reaches us has been stretched by the expansion. To calculate the age of the planet and its distance to us, scientists use redshift measurements. Redshift is a measure of distance. The greater the redshift, the further you can look back into time. 1963, has been the only 40 quassiers to have a redshift greater than 6. This is a marker of the origins of the early Universe. Artist’s rendering showing a quasar that has a black hole supermassive in the far future. (Image: Zhaoyu Li/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Misti Mountain Observatory) Team-leader Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University and the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said: “This quasar is very unique. Its glowing light, just like the most bright lighthouse in distant universe, will allow us to study more about early universe.” The latest quasar was detected by three telescopes: the 8.2m Gemini North Telescope (MMT), the 6.5m Multiple Mirror Telescope, (MMT), and 8.4m Large Binocular Telescopes (LBT) in Arizona. Also, the Magellan Telescope located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory (Chile). Yuri Beletsky (an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science) co-authored the paper. He said that the quasar was a laboratory for studying the evolution of a quasar’s black hole with its host galaxy. Fan stated that our findings suggest that quasar blackholes grew more quickly in the early Universe than their hosts. However, further research will be needed to verify this hypothesis. “And what is the relationship between this monster black hole and its surrounding environment, including its host galaxy?” “This ultraluminous quasar with its supermassive black hole provides a unique laboratory to the study of the mass assembly and galaxy formation around the most massive black holes in the early universe.” Citation: “An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6. 30,” Xue-Bing Wu, Feige Wang, Xiaohui Fan, Weimin Yi, Wenwen Zuo, Fuyan Bian, Linhua Jiang, Ian D. McGreer, Ran Wang, Jinyi Yang, Qian Yang, David Thompson & Yuri Beletsky. Nature 26 February 2015. DOI: 10. 1038/nature14241.
A massive black hole that is 12 billion times larger than the Sun’s and has 420 trillion times more luminosity was discovered by an international team
