Black hole sun - Event Horizon

An article from extreme tech on a massive black hole written by Ryan Whitwam on February 26th;

The universe is a huge place, and the numbers used to describe just how mind-bogglingly large things are out there can be hard to grasp on their own. For example, astronomers have recently discovered a black hole in a far away corner of the universe. This black hole isn’t just big — it’s monstrously large and almost impossibly bright. This object, some 12.8 billion light years away, is 420 trillion times more luminous and 12 billion times more massive than the sun.

Regardless of size, a black hole operates on the same principals across all of space and time (as far as we know). When a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it can no longer support itself and its own gravity causes it to collapse. When a star is sufficiently massive (several times larger than the sun), it forms a region of space so dense that not even light can escape from the so-called “event horizon.”

The newly discovered black hole, dubbed SDSS J010013.02, is remarkable for several reasons, not least of which is its incredible size. However, coupled with its advanced age, the mass is even more unusual. Because it’s 12.8 billion light years away, the light coming from this object is 12.8 billion years old. That places it very early in the universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. It’s six times larger and brighter than any other black hole from that era ever discovered.

Mass brightness graphYou might be wondering where all this light is coming from. This is a black hole after all, and we’re talking about it being bright. That might seem contradictory, but astronomers didn’t actually detect light coming from the black hole itself. J010013.02 could more accurately be called a quasar, an incredibly bright region of space caused by the glowing accretion disc around a supermassive black hole. As matter spirals into a black hole, it heats up and emits electromagnetic radiation. In this case, astronomers in China detected it as visible and near-infrared light with a small telescope, then enlisted the aid of astronomers in the US and Chile to take a closer look.

This is more than just another interesting quirk of the universe, though. The existence of SDSS J010013.02 could change the way scientists think about conditions in the early universe. This black hole would have accumulated enormous mass in a short period of time to become so huge. Some researchers even speculate that conditions in the early universe could have facilitated the formation of a black hole like this one from a large gas cloudrather than a star. Unless it’s a hologram, in which case all bets are off.

Astronomers are planning a series of follow-up observations of the quasar. Even though it’s extremely bright, the extraordinary distance will make it challenging to see what else is in the area. One notable upshot of the black hole’s location is that it could be used to illuminate anything that might exist between the quasar and Earth, allowing for the discovery of new objects and phenomena.