JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe
Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/jwst-spots-giant-black-holes-all-over-the-early-universe-20230814/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
10 replies
There's one right behind us, isn't there?
The sky...it's fulla holes.
There's a mod joke in there somewhere.
something something landed gentry
Yep, we're all gonna die when that thing gobbles us... In a few millions of years.
The things we see are from a millions years ago, who knows where or how big these are right now, might not even exist any more.
*Billions (13,000+ million). Based on our current understanding and their close proximity to each other in the early universe, most of them would have likely merged and many/most may be now at a size where it would take a google years to evaporate. The extremely small ones that did not merge may have already evaporated.
Source: Hawking radiation
From my understanding they would still have a looong way to go before they would have evaporated.
I thought so too but apparently the length of time it takes a black hole to evaporate is based on mass and those with a low mass — as in, the mass of the moon — should have already evaporated. Only supermassive black holes are the ones likely to take a google years to evaporate.
Edit: none of the ones pictured are that small. We probably couldn't detect them for hundreds/thousands of years (e.g. until solar system sized telescopes).
According to this calculator a black hole the size of the moon would take 584,745,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. I'm always open to correction though. (5.84745E44)