One of the Oldest Yet Energetic Supermassive Black Holes in the Universe

Black holes are space objects which have an immense gravitational field that cuts off a region of space from the rest of the universe, trapping all matter and radiation that enters that region. Black holes are thought to form in two ways, as a direct result of the gravitational collapse of a star, or by collisions between neutron stars.

Now, astronomers discovered one of the oldest supermassive black holes in the Universe, so powerful that, even now, the radiation it emitted 13 billion years ago can be detected using just medium-sized telescope on Earth.

The strange black hole may suggest the need to develop a "radical alternative" to present theories on the formation of black holes, said a member of the team that made the discovery, astronomer Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland, College Park.

Named CFHQS J2329-0301, this extremely energetic black hole is powering a quasar, the brightest objects in the universe, and gives off a light many times brighter than most galaxies.

Quasars are distant astronomical objects in the form of compact halo of matter surrounding the central supermassive black hole of a young galaxy, thought to be the active nuclei of young galaxies. Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers, but not all such black holes are quasars.

The black holes' mass has been calculated to be more than 500 times greater than the one of our Sun and is located at a distance from Earth equal to its age, about 13 billion years, meaning that the first light coming from it was actually the one produced by its birth.

It's actually quite puzzling for astronomers, as they don't know yet how something so massive could have formed so early, just 700 million years after the universe was born. Most probably, in order to reach such an impressive size so quickly, it must have doubled its mass hundreds of times faster than current theory says such objects can grow.

"This is a problem that is occupying lots of astronomers," says team leader Chris Willott of the University of Ottawa in Canada.