An international team of astronomers has discovered, thanks to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project , a supermassive black hole in the early universe ; that is, the one that began after the Big Bang. The finding has surprised the entire scientific community since it is the center of an ultraluminous quasar, the brightest object found so far from that period .
According to the researchers, the black hole would have a mass equivalent to 12,000 million suns , making it not only the brightest but also the largest black hole in the early universe, challenging modern theories regarding how the suns formed and grew. black holes in this period in the history of the universe, since until now it was thought that supermassive black holes formed together with galaxies .
“The formation of such a huge black hole at such a speed is difficult to interpret with current theories since this black hole in the center of the quasar gained a huge mass in a short period of time, ” explains Fuyan Bian of the Research School. of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University and co-author of the study that is collected in the journal Nature . And it is that according to current theories, the quasar, a source of electromagnetic energy, limits the growth of black holes, something that, as we have just discovered, does not happen with this particular object.
The researchers, led by Xue-Bing Wu of the University of Peking (China) also detailed in the study that the black hole of this ultra-luminous quasar with an unusually immense mass took place only 900 million years after the Big Bang .
