A new black hole 12 billion times bigger than the sun has been found, which possibly means that we're all doomed, maybe? Is that how science works?
The black hole is located pretty far away from us (around 12.8 billion light years, give or take a few million miles) and while it's not the biggest one ever found, it does seem to be the fastest growing one that scientists have come across.
The black hole grew to its current size 875 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only 6% of its current age, meaning that the team who discovered this may be able to study it to garner information about the early universe and the formation of black holes and galaxies.
The team from the Peking University in China published their findings in the journal Nature this week, and one of the researchers, Professor Xue-Bing Wu, said "this quasar is very unique...Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early universe."
The team were unable to actually see the black hole, as no light can escape its surface (we all know that from Interstellar, of course) but the surrounding quasar allowed them to measure just how powerful the black hole was, and its power, as well as the rate of growth, has led to some revisiting of previous theories about the formation of black holes.
The quasar has a million billion times the energy of our sun, and astronomers hypothesise that either two black holes merged together to form this incredible specimen, or that stars were more powerful in the early stages of the universe's existence, and fed more energy to the black hole as a result.
Via i100
