Astrophysicists at Stanford have identified a supersized whopper of a black hole—10 billion times the mass of our sun, and one of the oldest yet found. “It’s within a billion years of the origin of it all,” says associate professor of physics Roger Romani.
Scientists believe the universe formed some 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and the newly discovered black hole is thought to have formed at the end of what is called the “Dark Age,” when the universe began to light up with stars and galaxies. The hole, categorized as a “blazar,” sits in the center of a galaxy, sucking in stars and gases and generating enormous energy—a process “far more efficient even than nuclear fusion,” according to Romani.
Romani made the discovery with graduate student David Sowards-Emmerd, MS ’02, physics professor Peter Michelson, MS ’76, PhD ’80, and radio astronomer Lincoln Greenhill of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They worked together at Stanford’s Kavil Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. The team has surveyed some 200 blazars in preparation for the 2007 launch of NASA’s Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope, which will map the changing positions and intensities of celestial bodies over time.
