Sometimes black holes just don’t follow the rules. Astronomers announced in February that they found a black hole much bigger than it has any right to be — 12 billion times our sun’s mass, a shocking weight considering its age. The finding challenges theories of how black holes form.
When Xue-Bing Wu of Beijing’s Peking University and colleagues wanted to find the universe’s oldest black holes, they looked for bright old galaxies, since most large galaxies have a central supermassive black hole. When a black hole pulls in nearby stars and gas clumps, the material circles the dark object, like water around a drain. Friction in this disk heats the material, which then glows.
Wu’s team searched archived images of the sky for bright light sources, and after finding a promising one, called J0100+2802, they focused on it with five telescopes. Once Wu’s team confirmed that the black hole was ...
