SDSS J0100+2802, despite its distinctly forgettable name, is really rather special. Described in the latest issue of Nature, it's a newly discovered quasar, 12.8 billion light years away that shines as brightly as 420 million suns and is the brightest ever detected in the early universe.
At its centre is a truly gigantic black hole 12 billion times as massive as the sun, and six times greater than its largest-known contemporaries – it is by cosmological standards, a youngster, born a mere 900 million years after the universe itself came into being in the Big Bang. And by virtue of its youth and gargantuan size, an impossibility. Theoretically, that is.
“A black hole,” as Nasa defines it, “is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area – think of a star ten times more massive than the sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City. The result is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.” First detected via a 2.4-metre telescope at China’s Yunnan Observatory, the new find is challenging accepted wisdom on how black holes are formed – it was suggested that there is no way a black hole could grow fast enough in that short timespan to reach such a size.
Scientists believe that quasars – some 200,000 have been identified so far – are generated by matter heating up as it is dragged into supermassive black holes at the centre of very distant galaxies – the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is puny by comparison with the new find, with a mass four thousand times smaller.
So it’s back to the drawing board for science in its quest to understand the early universe, the process of star formation and the nature of black holes – perhaps two massive black holes collided, perhaps a huge seed black hole existed when the first generation stars and galaxies formed ... Our understanding of black holes is evolving – Stephen Hawking, in a paper last year, suggested that black holes, as we think we know them, may not exist at all, that, contrary to received wisdom, they may actually slowly leak. Heresy!