The discovery was made by the European Southern Observatory
Black holes are formed from the destruction of the first stars, but what leaves astronomers racking their brains is how they expanded into giants.
Yet another black hole was discovered recently by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and is dated to be less than a billion years old, and weighs in at 1 billion times the mass of our Sun.
Challenging already existing theories
From this, scientists are trying to understand the formation of black holes such as the recently discovered one in the centre of our Milky Way. Their current theory is that filaments that trap the cluster if galaxies contain enough gas for the black hole to absorb and grow in size.
Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna who led the research had this to say: “The cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads. The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas – available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole- can flow along the filaments.” This statement was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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Mignoli also added that there is currently “no good explanation” for the existence of these early supermassive black holes.
About the so-called spider’s web pattern, researchers say that it could’ve formed with the help of dark matter, which is believed to attract large amounts of gas when the universe came to be. Another statement from the ESO said that the web is over 300 times the size of the Milky Way.
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This could be considered as one of the biggest events since the Big Bang as the results were gravitational waves produced more than seven billion years ago by colliding against each other, releasing eight solar masses of energy. Scientists believe that this is challenging all existing theories on the formation of supermassive black holes.
(Cover: ScienceAlert)