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Scientists have found an ancient black hole – named LID-568 – that is devouring matter at 40 times the maximum speed physics thought possible. This sheds new light, in a sense, on how the universe came to look like it does today. Supermassive black holes like LID-568 are at the heart of every galaxy including our own and are necessary for galaxies to form. Previous theories assumed black holes were created when very large stars, some twenty times the size of our own Sun, fell in on themselves at the end of their lives, but LID-568 was vast and hungry long before the first stars had time to collapse. According to Dr Ziri Younsi at UCL the presence of many black holes in the early universe suggests they may belong to a category of their own, having emerged during the Big Bang to “seed” the universe, or formed very shortly afterwards from clouds of gas.
LID-568 was discovered thanks to infrared radiation gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope and analysed by a team at the International Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. The radiation left LID-568 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The universe has expanded rapidly over the course of its journey towards Earth, so it has taken over 12 billion years to reach us. This light comes from the black hole’s accretion disk, radiation-emitting rings of gas and dust that surround such dark and infinitely dense singularities. The team plans further, more sensitive observations to try to understand why LID-568 is so large and feeding at far higher rates than previously thought possible. Understanding the birth of supermassive black holes could help explain how galaxies formed and how our galaxy, Sun and planet came to be.
