By Deutsch: Ute Kraus, Physikdidaktik Ute Kraus, Universität Hildesheim, Tempolimit Lichtgeschwindigkeit, (Milchstraßenpanorama im Hintergrund: Axel Mellinger) English: Ute Kraus, Physics education group Kraus, Universität Hildesheim, Space Time Travel, (background image of the milky way: Axel Mellinger) [CC BY-SA 2.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
Image: Black Hole Milky Way, Ute Kraus [CC BY-SA 2.5] via Wikimedia Commons
Interstellar‘s bad boy (and central plot device) has got nothing on this astronomical discovery.

A mammoth black hole — and that’s “mammoth” in terms of tonnage — has been found by scientists, weighing in at as much as 12 billion of our suns.

National Geographic, while allowing that it’s not the biggest black hole ever discovered, says “it’s astonishingly young.” That translates to growing to its size “only” 875 million years after the big bang, “when the universe was just 6 percent of its current age.” That’s nothing in, uh, dog star years.

The letter in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature (sporting the black-holishly dense title of, “An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30“) prompted lead author Xue-Bing Wu of China’s Peking University to ponder, “How do you build such a big black hole in such a short time?”

The black hole was discovered by spotting a quasar, a brilliantly glowing object which itself was described as “the biggest monster we’ve ever detected in terms of luminosity” by a Harvard astronomer. Quasars get bright as their superheated gas tries to “squeeze” into the black hole. This one quasar? “About 40,000 times as bright as the entire Milky Way,” National Geographic quotes.

It’s the brightness of the quasar that led astronomers to indirectly identify and size the black hole inside.

How the black hole was created and grew is all speculation at this point. A merger of two or more galaxies and their underlying black holes? A few extra-massive early stars collapsing?

We may never know for certain, directly. The light from this particular quasar has been en route to Earth for about 12 billion years.

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