Scientists have discovered a black hole 12 times the size of the sun and about 900 million years old, located in the center of a quasar that shines with the
brightness of 420 trillion suns, according to the University of Arizona.
Quasar is a shortened version of “quasi-stellar radio source” and they emit radio waves. “The best explanation seems to be that quasars are super-massive
black holes in the centers of galaxies,” NASA explained. “As material spirals into the black holes, a large part of the mass is converted to energy. It is this energy that we see.”
An international team of astronomers reported on the supermassive black hole in the journal Nature this month. Researcher Xiaohui Fan, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said the quasar discovered by the team is ultraluminous and offers a puzzle as to black hole growth.
“How can a quasar so luminous, and a black hole so massive, form so early in the history of the universe, at an era soon after the earliest stars and galaxies have just emerged?" Fan said. "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."
The black hole’s tremendous growth rate will offer the opportunity for study. “People assume there’s a fast growth rate for these black holes, but the energy released by the black hole will often stop the flow of new material. Therefore it doesn’t grow that fast over the course of its lifetime,” Bram Venemans, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute,
told Popular Science. “But this black hole must have grown close to a maximum rate for most of its lifetime without the growth being stopped by energy output.”
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