Monster mix

• Autores: Stephen Battersby
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2907, 2013, págs. 44-47
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The conventional tale of supermassive black holes begins a few tens of millions of years after the big bang, as the very first stars formed from the densest clouds of primordial hydrogen and helium gas. These pioneers, the story goes, were several hundred times the mass of the sun. The core of such a star soon collapses to form a black hole of around 100 solar masses, As this seed gorges on gas it sinks towards the center of its galaxy, eventually becoming the powerful heart of a quasar. In 2000, however, NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope spied a very distant and powerful quasar. One can see SDSS 11030+0524 as it was just 900 million years after the big bang, and its power output must come from a hole of more than a billion solar masses. Here, Battersby explores how giant black holes get so vast and so fast.