Supermassive Black Hole Discovered

Given that this website is entitled Black Hole Thoughts, it seems only right to have some posts devoted to black holes.

Last month, Dr. Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues from the University of Hawaii reported they discovered a distant galaxy swirling around the most super-massive black hole ever detected.

The galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbours a super-massive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as our Sun.

Black holes are such large concentrations of matter, that nothing can escape their gravity wells, not even light.  They are believed to be created when massive stars die and collapse from their own gravity.  Black holes were first theorized by English geologist John Mitchell and French astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace in the late eighteenth century, calling them “gravitationally collapsed objects.”  Princeton physicist John Wheeler invented the term ”black holes” in 1969.

Source: ScienceDaily article