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Old Black hole puzzles scientist's

103 views · Published 13 December 2017 · 1:49 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: Civil Disturbia · 2017 · Science & Technology

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At a distance of about 13 billion lightyears, the most distant supermassive black hole known so far has been spotted by an international team of astronomers. That incredible distance means the object dates back to the time when the first stars blinked on, which raises the question of how a black hole that big arose so soon after the universe began.

The newly-discovered black hole is part of a quasar, meaning it sits at the center of a cloud of gas that it's slowly swallowing. As the gas falls into the black hole, it speeds up, heats up and brightens, which allows astronomers to see them from across the universe.

"Quasars are among the brightest and most distant known celestial objects and are crucial to understanding the early universe," says Bram Venemans of the Max Planck Institute, co-author of a study describing the discovery.

This quasar was first identified in data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) program, then studied in closer detail by scientists using Carnegie Observatories' Magellan telescopes in Chile. There, a spectrometer known as the Folded-port InfraRed Echellette (FIRE) was able to determine the objects' distance and mass based on its "redshift."

Since the universe is constantly expanding, distant objects are moving away from us, which stretches out the wavelength of the light they emit. That means the light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum, and the higher an object's redshift, the further away it is. With a redshift of 7.5, the newly-discovered quasar began emitting light a mere 690 million years after the Big Bang, and the supermassive black hole at its center has 800 million times the mass of our Sun.

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