Yale University | 2015 Jul 09
[img3="(Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein)"]http://news.yale.edu/sites/default/file ... 1436464898[/img3][hr][/hr]Astronomers have spotted a super-sized black hole in the early universe that grew much faster than its host galaxy.
The discovery runs counter to most observations about black holes, which are massive areas of space with extraordinarily strong gravity that can pull in anything — even light. In most cases, black holes and their host galaxies expand at the same rate.
This particular black hole formed in the early universe, roughly two billion years after the Big Bang. An international research group made the discovery during 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.
“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.” ...
Gigantic, Early Black Hole Could Upend Evolutionary Theory
W.M. Keck Observatory | 2015 Jul 09
An over-massive black hole in a typical star-forming galaxy, 2 billion years after the Big Bang - Benny Trakhtenbrot et al
- Science 349(6244) 168 (10 July 2015) DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa4506
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1507.02290 > 08 Jul 2015