Black hole discovered 12 billion times larger than the Sun

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole, dubbed a space monster, 12 billion times larger than the Sun.

Simulation of a quasar and a large black hole. Photo: Shanghai Astronomical Observatory

Scientists named the object SDSS J0100+2802. It is about 12.8 billion light-years away and formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang, according to the Washington Post.

SDSS J0100+2802 is 12 billion times more massive than the Sun, and the quasar (a luminous object that spawns from a giant black hole) is 420,000 billion times brighter. It can even be detected with a small telescope. Chinese scientists, along with colleagues in Chile and the US, studied it and obtained a higher resolution image.

"How could such a large black hole have appeared at the very beginning of the universe? We have no hypothesis to explain this," said Xue-Bing Wu, an expert at Peking University. Black holes can suck in surrounding matter at extremely high speeds. However, the radiation from quasars should have limited this accumulation process before large black holes formed.

Experts say they will use the quasar as a "lighthouse" to help identify other cosmic objects. "This is an opportunity to learn more about objects between the Milky Way and ours," Wu said.

According to VnExpress