discovered

The mass of the extra-large black hole now discovered by astronomers is larger than that of 12 billion suns. Most laypeople have a hard time imagining what that means. Try to picture this black hole sucking in everything that comes too close, due to its enormous mass.

As black holes do, this supermassive black hole sits at the center of its galaxy, like a spider in its web. It swallows up everything around it - gas, dust, stars - getting bigger and bigger that way. Shortly before all this material disappears forever in the hole's greedy gorge, a bright light is emitted due to extreme heat that is created in the process.

Black holes aren't black

In the case of this supermassive black hole, the glow is enormous. Scientists say that it's 420 trillion times brighter than our sun - another inconceivable number. From this piece of information, the researchers have deduced that the black hole must have originated during the very early stages of our universe.

According to their calculations, it's roughly 12.8 billion light years away from Earth. That means that the light we see today traveled for 12.8 billion years to get to us. So, what we see today is actually from when our universe was a mere 900 million years old.

Such compact regions around an ultra-luminous, supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy are called quasars. This newly discovered quasar is now supposed to reveal secrets astronomers have been looking into for a long time. Like, what were conditions like shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe was born? And, how has it changed over the billions of years?

The team of international researchers around Xue-Bing Wu from Beijing University has published its discovery in "Nature" magazine. You can read the abstract here - have fun!