Astronomers have spotted a super-sized black hole in the early universe that grew much faster than its host galaxy, according to an international research group reported Yale News.
The group discovered the phenomenon while working on a project to map the growth of supermassive black holes across cosmic time. The team included astronomers from Yale University, ETH Zurich, the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, Harvard University, the University of Hawaii, INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, and Oxford University.
Earlier observations point that Black holes are massive areas of space with extremely strong gravity that can pull in anything - even light. In most cases, black holes and their host galaxies expand at the same rate. This discovery runs counter to the observations, writes Jim Shelton in an article published in Yale News.
This particular black hole formed about two billion years after the Big Bang had happened.
“Our survey was designed to observe the average objects, not the exotic ones,” said C. Megan Urry, Yale’s Israel Munson Professor of Astrophysics and co-author of a study about the phenomenon in the journal Science. “This project specifically targeted moderate black holes that inhabit typical galaxies today. It was quite a shock to see such a ginormous black hole in such a deep field.”
“Most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have a black hole at their center, holding millions to billions of solar masses. Not only does the new study challenge previous notions about the way host galaxies grow in relation to black holes, it also challenges earlier suggestions that the radiation emitted by expanding black holes curtails the creation of stars,” writes Shelton in his article.
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