Cambridge researchers discover new population of super massive black holes
09 Oct 2012
Researchers at the Cambridge University have discovered a new population of enormous, rapidly growing super-massive black holes ever seen in the early universe. The black holes earlier went undetected as they sat cocooned within thick layers of dust.
The new study that used cutting-edge infrared surveys of the sky showed that the holes were emitting vast amounts of radiation through violent interactions with their host galaxies.
The study findings have been published in the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the most extreme object in the study is a super-massive black hole called ULASJ1234+0907.
The object, located in the direction of the constellation of Virgo, is so distant that light emitted from it took 11 billion years to reach the earth, so what we see is what happened in the early universe.
The monster black hole has a mass more than 10 billion times the mass of the sun and 10,000 times the mass of the super-massive black hole in our own Milky Way, which makes it one of the most massive ever seen.
The research points out that there may be as many as 400 such giant black holes in the part of the universe that we can observe.