![]() ![]() ![]() Once they determined it was likely to be a distant quasar, they observed it with the monster 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii and the 8-meter Very Large Telescope in Chile. It may not look like much, but it’s 12.5 billion light years away, and blasts out energy a thousand times our entire galaxy. The quasar SMSS J215728.21–360215.1 hosts the most massive black hole known in the very early Universe. The astronomers found it looking at sky surveys for objects with the right colors to be very very far away active galaxies, and this one was found in the SkyMapper Southern Survey (hence the SMSS in the name the rest is for its coordinates on the sky). The temperature is so high, and there’s so much matter in the disk, that it glows incredibly brightly, in general outshining all the stars in the galaxy combined. ![]() Matter that's closer in moves very near the speed of light, and stuff farther out is slower, and as they rub together they generate friction, which heats the disk up a lot (imagine rubbing your hands together at the speed of light to see why). This stuff piles up into a disk around the black hole, swirling madly around it. These are where the central supermassive black hole (which every big galaxy has) is actively eating material. The black hole is in the center of an active galaxy called a quasar. Astronomers have found the most massive known black hole in the very early Universe, and it’s a whopper: It has 34 billion - yes, billion, with a b - times the mass of the Sun.Īnd that’s only one part of this story that has the hair on the back of my neck standing up. ![]()
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