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12-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole Discovered
sciencehabit writes: A team of astronomers has discovered what is, in galactic terms, a monstrous baby: a gigantic black hole of 12 billion solar masses in a barely newborn galaxy, just 875 million years after the big bang. It's roughly 3000 times the size of our Milky Way's central black hole. To have grown to such a size in so short a time, it must have been munching matter at close to the maximum physically possible rate for most of its existence. Its large size and rate of consumption also makes it the brightest object in that distant era, and astronomers can use its bright light to study the composition of the early universe: how much of the original hydrogen and helium from the big bang had been forged into heavier elements in the furnaces of stars.
My thoughts.
If something had to be doing the maximum possible for its entire existence to get that far, chances are that's not the maximum possible, or we're measuring something wrong.
That's not a banker, that enormous black hole is your mom!
Have you ever watched a waterfall?
Ever wonder how all the water doesn't just fall at once?
How about a traffic jam?
While the mechanics behind it are vastly more complex, the end result is quite similar for black holes. There's only so much matter that can transit across the event horizon (a finite surface area) in a given amount of time and if more matter is available it get's blocked up and the excess has to wait.
Personally, I think "dark matter" and "dark energy" don't really exist. Instead, I think there's something wrong with our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe.
That is exactly what Dark Matter is and has always been claimed to be. It is a gap in our knowledge with certain characteristics. We know it is not baryonic matter, we know it is not an issue with gravity, as assume it is matter because matter has mass and mass distorts space(aka gravity). The biggest problem is that Dark Matter is the longest standing unknown in all of history. Through all of recorded history, problems have been solved shortly after the discovery of the problem. Dark Matter is nearly a century old and almost a magnitude worse than any other problem.
Plenty of great minds have looked at the problem. Our only hope is to keep running more tests and for technology to allow our tests to get better.