The European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope captured a strange light signal from the past more than 12 billion years ago reaching Earth: a supermassive black hole removing six galaxies.
The strange object, SDSS J1030 + 0524, is a quasar – a type of “quasar”, which looks like a star but is not. It’s a horror black hole “in disguise”.
If in the present, supermassive supermassive black holes such as the central black hole of the Milky Way galaxy containing Earth have been called “monster” black holes, then the newly discovered objects are “monster monsters”.
Measurements suggest they belong to the early universe, where light took over 12 billion years to reach Earth. The first black holes are not only extremely large and powerful, but also extremely fast. During the first 900 million years of the universe, they must have reached the equivalent of a billion suns by mass. For so long, the scientific world has been stuck at a dead end trying to find out what feeds these super monsters.
The newly discovered horror object provided the answer: The Very Large Telescope identified a tangled web of 6 galaxies that were kidnapped and “sucking blood” by a black hole. They form a complex web of cobwebs more than 300 times the size of the galaxy containing Earth.
Dr Marco Mignoli, the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) astronomer who led the study, said the discovery is valuable in helping to solve the mysteries of supermassive black holes in the primordial cylinder of the universe, one of the astronomical challenges.
Light from a supermassive black hole that took over 12 billion years to reach the human eye also means what we are seeing is an image from over 12 billion years ago, an exciting opportunity. “through the air”.
