The Supermassive Black Hole
Posted on January 16, 2008
The Daily Galaxy has a great post about a massive black hole that sits at the center of a distant galaxy. The supermassive black hole has mass of 18 billion Suns. It also has a smaller black hole rotating around it.
Space.com had an article on this monster black hole a couple years ago. They say it is 12.7 billion years old.
Sitting at the heart of a distant galaxy, the black hole appears to be about 12.7 billion years old, which means it formed just one billion years after the universe began and is one of the oldest supermassive black holes ever known.Every galaxy has one of these according to NASA. This page on NASA says "it is now believed that at the center of each galaxy there is a super-massive black hole that is millions to billions of times heavier than our sun."The black hole, researchers said, is big enough to hold 1,000 of our own Solar Systems and weighs about as much as all the stars in the Milky Way.
"The universe was awfully young at the time this was formed," said astronomer Roger Romani, a Stanford University associate professor whose team found the object. "It's a bit of a challenge to understand how this black hole got enough mass to reach its size."
Romani told SPACE.com that the black hole is unique because it dates back to just after a period researchers call the 'Dark Ages,' a time when the universe cooled down after the initial Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. That cooling period lasted about one billion years, when the first black holes, stars and galaxies began to appear, he added. The research appeared June 10 on the online version of Astrophysical Journal Letters.