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Astronomers Discover 83 Supermassive Black Holes at the Edge of the Universe (cnet.com)
"A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the motherlode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars," reports CNET:
The Japanese team turned the ultra-powerful "Hyper Suprime-Cam", mounted to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, toward the cosmos' darkest corners, surveying the sky over a period of five years. By studying the snapshots, they've been able to pick potential quasar candidates out of the dark. Notably, their method of probing populations of supermassive black holes that are similar in size to the ones we see in today's universe, has given us a window into their origins.
After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a suite of international telescopes to confirm their findings. The quasars they've plucked out are from the very early universe, about 13 billion light years away. Practically, that means the researchers are looking into the past, at objects form less than a billion years after the Big Bang. "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release. Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration.
After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a suite of international telescopes to confirm their findings. The quasars they've plucked out are from the very early universe, about 13 billion light years away. Practically, that means the researchers are looking into the past, at objects form less than a billion years after the Big Bang. "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release. Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration.
I think they mean, edge of the observable universe.
It's always the way, innit? You hang around for three million years in deep space and there hasn't been one, then all of a sudden eighty three turn up at once.
Android Software Engineer
Ah the old brilliant line of "I'm dumb, therefore no-one else can know anything".
"Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration."
A nice departure from the hyperbolic "Scientists are shocked to find...." or "Scientists scramble to find answers when the laws of physics are turned on their head!" sort of wording.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Light scatters in all directions (for the most part) from the origin of a single point of event.
No, a photon will travel in a straight line from it's point of origin unless acted upon by an outside force. You are describing what happens to the innumerable photons that are emitted from a typical light source which is not the same thing. The photons that we see from these distant sources have traveled a long distance in a straight line (*) to get to us.
(* straight in this context is not the same Euclidean geometry straight line you might have learned about in high school)
So if it happened 13 billions year ago, how is it still observable?
Because the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. Space itself is expanding to this day and so some light that was emitted a long time ago is just now reaching us. Some light that was emitted a long time ago will never reach us because it's too far away and space is expanding too fast for it to ever get to us.
Its because from the perspective of the traveling particle (or person) there is no light speed limit or speed limit of any kind. Light is just infinitely fast from its own perspective and travels any distance in no time at all. This can be shown experimentally as well as through theory, without mass it can't experience any changes without outside influence along its path. Neutrinos, for example, change flavors as they travel and thus have mass because they must experience time as they travel. The universe simply ages around photons in an amount proportional to the distance it had to travel. Same would hold for a person in an intimately fast spaceship, the universe would contract to a point directly ahead and behind and be of infinite brightness and the universe would simply not exist at all to the "sides".
Back to your original question, space is larger than we can see, by a factor of around 10,000 at least, we can and have measured this it's called the flatness (or curvature) of spacetime. It's better to think of all points in space time touching at the instant of the Big Bang, then hyper inflation expanded them far faster than lightspeed. We can see the initial quantum fluctuations expanded to bigger than our visible space and imprinted on the cosmic background radiation. These points were essentially torn from each other such that they could no longer influence each other like we classically think. So as time goes on, more and more of these points "reconnect" as time goes on and light can finally catch up with them. So points that are just coming into view now, are ones that haven't "seen" each other in 13.8 billion years. It dosent have anything to do with light starting from here and ending here at all. As time goes on and space starts picking up accelerating expansion due to dark energy, these points will be torn away from each other yet again never (presumably) to classically interact again and our visible universe will shrink. This is a bit simplified but is fairly accurate nonetheless.
And one restaurant.