CNN Indonesia
Friday, 10 Mar 2023 12:54 WIB
Illustration. Black holes measuring 1 billion times the mass of the Sun have been discovered by experts. (iStockphoto/Cappan)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
A black hole a giant 1 billion times the mass Sun found at the center of the galaxy COS-87259. The findings allegedly could overturn the understanding of the Universe.
This is because the black hole was formed only 750 million years after the Big Bang.
Quoted from Space, The existence of the black hole was detected by radio observations of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile as a point 10 times smaller than the Moon. This black hole is hidden under a shroud of turbulent star dust.
It also seems to grow rapidly as it eats up a portion of the disk of material orbiting it while spewing out the rest at speeds close to the speed of light.
This voracious gargantua-like black hole appears to be in a rare intermediate growth stage. Its growth phase lies between a dusty star-forming galaxy and a massive, brightly shining black hole called a quasar.
The existence of this black hole could be just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. In studies in journals Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Societyexperts suspect that there are still many other supermassive black holes hiding in the cloud cover of the early Universe.
“Frankly, explaining the existence of about 15 of the earliest luminous quasars is a huge challenge for extragalactic astronomy given how short it has been for massive black holes to grow since the Big Bang,” said study leader Ryan Endsley, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin.
“If black holes billions of times the mass of the sun are more common than we think, it will only exacerbate existing problems,” he added.
Black holes can be born from the collision of massive stars and grow by continuously devouring gas, dust, stars and other black holes in the star-forming galaxies that host them.
If the black hole grows large enough, friction causes material to swirl into the black hole, turning it into a quasar.
Because light travels at a constant speed in the vacuum of outer space, the deeper experts look into the Universe, the more remote light they encounter. At the same time, the further they look into the past.
Previous ‘cosmic dawn’ simulations suggest that billowing clouds of cold gas may have coalesced into a giant star. The star will then rapidly collapse, creating a black hole.
As the universe grew, that first black hole might quickly merge with others to produce even bigger supermassive black holes throughout the cosmos.
However, how these chaotic conditions led to the creation of so many supermassive black holes is still a mystery to experts.
The mystery is deepened by the possibility that the series of black holes could number in the thousands when the universe was only 5 percent of its current age.
(lth)
