Washington, Dec 7 (PTI) Scientists have discovered thefarthest known supermassive black hole - a matter-eating beastthat is 800 million times the mass of our Sun.
Astronomers combined data from NASA's Wide-field InfraredSurvey Explorer (WISE) with ground-based surveys to identifypotential distant objects to study, then followed up withCarnegie Observatories' Magellan telescopes in Chile.
Researchers identified candidates out of the hundreds ofmillions of objects WISE found that would be worthy offollow-up with Magellan.
"This black hole grew far larger than we expected in only690 million years after the Big Bang, which challenges ourtheories about how black holes form," said Daniel Stern ofNASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.
For black holes to become so large in the early universe,astronomers speculate there must have been special conditionsto allow rapid growth - but the underlying reason remainsmysterious.
The newly found black hole is voraciously devouringmaterial at the centre of a galaxy - a phenomenon called aquasar.
This quasar is especially interesting because it comesfrom a time when the universe was just beginning to emergefrom its dark ages.
The discovery will provide fundamental information aboutthe universe when it was only 5 percent of its current age.
"Quasars are among the brightest and most distant knowncelestial objects and are crucial to understanding the earlyuniverse," said Bram Venemans of the Max Planck Institute forAstronomy in Germany.
The universe began in a hot soup of particles thatrapidly spread apart in a period called inflation.
About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, these particlescooled and coalesced into neutral hydrogen gas.
However, the universe stayed dark, without any luminoussources, until gravity condensed matter into the first starsand galaxies.
The energy released by these ancient galaxies caused theneutral hydrogen to get excited and ionise, or lose anelectron. The gas has remained in that state since that time.
Once the universe became re-ionised, photons could travelfreely throughout space. This is the point at which theuniverse became transparent to light.
Much of the hydrogen surrounding the newly discoveredquasar is neutral. That means the quasar is not only the mostdistant - it is also the only example we have that can be seenbefore the universe became re-ionised.
"It was the universe's last major transition and one ofthe current frontiers of astrophysics," said Eduardo Banados,astronomer at Carnegie Observatories in the US. PTI MHNMHN.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.