Tau.Neutrino said:
Mysterious black hole discovered at the dawn of the universe
At a distance of about 13 billion lightyears, the most distant supermassive black hole known so far has been spotted by an international team of astronomers. That incredible distance means the object dates back to the time when the first stars blinked on, which raises the question of how a black hole that big arose so soon after the universe began.
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AwesomeO said:
Don’t know if it’s of any relevance but in this mornings news feed:
IT’S almost as far into space — and back in time — as we can see.
It’s a black hole.
A big one. Some 800 million times the mass of our own Sun.
It’s also so far away, it must have been chewing its way through the assemble gas clouds and early stars of the infant universe itself.
It shouldn’t exist.
It lived at a time shortly after clouds of energetic particles cooled into nitrogen gas, when the universe was only just inventing the idea of stars.
EXPLORE MORE: Can black holes prove the Big Bang didn’t happen?
It had reached its size just 690 million years after the point beyond which there is nothing. The most dominant scientific theory of recent years describes that point as the Big Bang — a spontaneous eruption of reality as we know it out of a quantum singularity.
But another idea has recently been gaining weight: that the universe goes through periodic expansions and contractions — resulting in a “Big Bounce”.
And the existence of early black holes has been predicted to be a key telltale as to whether or not the idea may be valid.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/black-hole-at-the-dawn-of-time-challenges-our-understanding-of-how-the-universe-was-formed/news-story/3279356705a47d45416ae2e6ead41175