Astronomers managed to discover a very old black hole with the help of the Webb Space Telescope. But they do not know how to explain its gigantic dimensions, which contradict the existing knowledge about the universe.
An international team of European, Canadian and American scientists has found a black hole more than 13 billion years old. The discovery was announced by the British University of Cambridge and according to interested experts, it means a significant leap in the knowledge of the universe.
Astronomers discovered this oldest known black hole with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope. And it’s much bigger than they expected. “The fact that this surprisingly massive black hole with the mass of millions of Suns formed so early in the universe challenges our ideas about how black holes form and grow,” the university explains the uniqueness of the discovery.
The object is located in the distant and ancient galaxy GN-z11, located 13.4 billion light-years away. The light that comes from it to the Earth, so the stars in it shone “only” 400 million years after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, the website reminds Space.com. Not even half a billion years of existence, according to current knowledge, could not have been enough for it to grow so much.
“It’s like seeing a family walking down the street with a meter-tall toddler,” Maynooth University researcher John Regan described the strangeness of the discovery to a popular-science website.
Scientists have several theories as to how this disparity arose. However, gas-rich conditions in the young universe probably played a role in the formation of the hole. One of the theories, for example, assumes that the gas clumped together so quickly that instead of a star, a straight black hole arose from it.
Another then assumes that the black hole was first a star, as is usual, but managed to absorb matter much faster than scientists previously thought possible. But the truth will probably be revealed by further research.
Breathtaking footage from space. The grouping of stars resembles a Christmas tree (12/2023):
TN.cz
2024-01-19 04:59:00
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