LONDON: Scientists have confirmed that a giant sized black hole exists. Researchers from the Peking University of China and the University of Arizona have announced that the discovery of this black hole is twelve times the size of our sun that makes this one six times bigger than the largest known black holes. The black hole, along with its massive size, is estimated to be nine hundred million years old.
The black hole named as SDSS J010013.02 is said to have provided power to the brightest quasar that existed in the early days of the universe.
“We were surprised,” said study coauthor Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer with the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“We’re not used to looking at objects that bright because when we think about these quasars as distant objects, they’re supposed to be very faint,” Fan said.
According to a release from the research team, “The existence of such black holes when the Universe was less than one billion years old presents substantial challenges to theories of the formation and growth of black holes and the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies.”
“This quasar is a unique laboratory to study the way that a quasar’s black hole and host galaxy co-evolve,” team-leader Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University and the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics told Astronomy Now, “Our findings indicate that in the early universe, quasar black holes probably grew faster than their host galaxies, although more research is needed to confirm this idea.”
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