Found: The most distant supermassive black hole ever observed
Quasars have been my favorite astronomical phenomena since I was a kid, and they continue to fascinate. They are, essentially, very young galaxies fueled by supermassive black holes that are voraciously feeding on gas and dust, and they are typically the furthest and brightest burning things in the Cosmos. This one is SO far away, and therefore it's light is from SO long ago, that it will be a major factor in learning about the very early Universe...
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...-ftm120517.php
"A team of astronomers led by Carnegie's Eduardo Baņados used Carnegie's Magellan telescopes to discover the most-distant supermassive black hole ever observed. It resides in a luminous quasar and its light reaches us from when the universe was only 5 percent of its current age -- just 690 million years after the Big Bang. Their findings are published by Nature...
...This newly discovered black hole has a mass that is 800 million times the mass of our Sun...
...The Baņados quasar is especially interesting, because it is from the time known as the epoch of reionization, when the universe emerged from its dark ages."
Found: The most distant supermassive black hole ever observed
Fascinating stuff... simply put, its "mind boggling" trying to put that into perspective of time and distance.
...at least for my addled mind. I've said it before, there are a lot of reasons that folks may wish they were younger. For me it's wanting to know more about space exploration and where and what our growing technologies will take us.
Knowing how much advancement there has been in the last fifty years, what will the next fifty years reveal?
...mind boggling
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