Is This the Earliest Black Hole Ever Discovered?

Amaze Lab

This is a photo recently captured of deep space and astrophysicists say it's the light from a doomed galaxy that has likely been gone for billions of years. This is galaxy GN-z11 and it was formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang, in fact that’s when this light was emitted, meaning we;re looking back in time 13.4 billion years.

Transcript

00:00If I asked you to tell me what you're seeing here, you would probably imagine you're in a

00:08psychiatrist's office, not an observatory. However, this is indeed a photo recently captured of deep

00:14space, and astrophysicists say it's the light from a doomed galaxy that has likely been gone

00:19for billions of years. This is galaxy GNZ11, and it was formed just 400 million years after the

00:25Big Bang. In fact, that's when this light was emitted, meaning we're looking back in time 13.4

00:30billion years. The galaxy is spinning headlong into a primordial black hole around 1.6 million times

00:36the mass of our sun, and this blob is revealing something quite tremendous to scientists. Because

00:41this one formed in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang, it sort of proves the direct collapse model,

00:46or where black holes may form from the collapsing of a star, rather than via accreting material from

00:51elsewhere. However, there likely weren't stars large enough to produce a black hole of this size at that

00:55time. So what does that mean? Well, the direct collapse model as we know it in the modern universe

00:59might require a hyper-dense star. But in the early days after the Big Bang, there may have been

01:04massive swathes of matter just ready to collapse into one of these cosmic gobblers. Astronomers say

01:09the black hole at the center of GNZ11 is now the earliest ever discovered.

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