People may be hearing about all these advancements and findings with black holes, but not know what they are. Well, here’s our Cliff Notes version. Black holes are areas in space with incredible gravity, so they pull in everything around them, including light. Light, like most everything, is a physical object, and since the gravity from black holes is so immense, it sucks in light. As to the formation of black holes, most people always hear the same things: “supernova” or “dying star”, which is correct in terms of stellar black holes. There are three types of black holes: stellar, intermediate, and supermassive. Stellar black holes are the most common in discussion because we know how they form. Stellars are formed when a star’s reached the end of its life, and its energy output diminishes to the point where it can’t support itself under its own gravity. A good example is a rubber band. If you were to stretch out a rubber band across your hand and hold it there, you could probably keep it stretched for a good couple of minutes. However, after some time your hand may get tired and you’ll let the rubber band shrink down a bit. Over time, it shrinks bit by bit until finally your hand gives out and the rubber band snaps back together. That's pretty much what happens to a star, except it takes millions of years, and the rubber band snapping back together is bit more explosive. Since a star is much bigger than a rubber band, there is a lot more mass to be compressed into a small space, so all that pressure needs to go somewhere. Here is where everyone’s favorite space term comes in: supernova. It becomes a supernova because of all that pressure the star explodes, sending particles of the star out in all directions. Now you may ask, if the supernova is a giant explosion, and the star stuff gets blasted everywhere, where does a black hole come in? Well, when a supernova occurs, the outer portions of the star are blown off, but the center is left, and that becomes either a neutron star or a black hole. We won’t get into neutron stars here, but the result depends on the size of the supernova. If it’s a big supernova, than it usually leaves behind a black hole. As to how, well that’s the cool part. When the star collapses onto itself, all the mass is compressed into an incredibly small space, but the gravity from the star doesn’t dissipate. Gravity is based on the mass of an object. Everything has gravity; we have gravity, but since we’re so small it isn’t noticeable. Since a star, which has a lot of gravity, had been condensed into a small ball of matter, it’s gravity is increased. This tiny ball of condensed matter begins to pull on everything around it, including light; thusly named, a black hole. Albert Einstein had predicted the existence of these Black Holes in 1916, and people reacted the same way they always do: “you’re crazy.” However, astronomers actually observed a black hole in 1971, but the first visual evidence was seen in 2012 when astronomers accidentally caught an intermediate black hole with their telescope. The first picture of black hole was produced in 2019 using the event-horizon telescope and was seen in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy. I won’t go into how far away it is or which cluster of galaxies that is— that would just tangent into a whole new topic.
Now that we’re all armed with this black hole knowledge, let’s jump into 2021’s recent discovery. There has been a discovery from the University of Arizona of a supermassive black hole that is 13.03 billion light years away. Why is this one so special? It is both the farthest one we have been able to identify, and it is the oldest one we can date. It’s dated back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, so around 5% of our universe’s current age. Now, with this discovery comes another space word: quasars. Yeah, I know, another cool sounding space word that nobody really knows. A quasar is actually pretty easy to explain. So you know how the Earth orbits around the Sun because the Sun has such strong gravity, but the Earth moves so fast that we’ve entered an orbit? Well the same thing can happen around a black hole. Light and other particles can be caught in a tight and fast orbit around a supermassive black hole; this is called an accretion disk. This accretion disk is filled with superheated matter, which glows, sometimes even more brightly than their host galaxies. The entirety of both the black hole and the accretion disk is a quasar. The quasar discovered earlier this month is host to a supermassive black hole with the mass of about 1.6 billion suns. The reason this is getting so much attention is its size. It is twice as big as the previous record-holding quasar. Scientists are curious as to how it formed since their previous models for how supermassive black holes formed can’t explain this one. The previous formation models were either a large of stars collapsed around the same time and formed one large black hole, or a theory discussing stars with different levels of elements and how they interacted with later formed stars. Due to this quasar’s unknown formation, this provides a chance for scientists to understand how galaxies function, and the creation of the universe. With this discovery, cosmologists have deduced that these supermassive black holes get so large by sucking in a lot of the particles required to form new stars. They believe this may be the reason galaxies stop forming new stars. Now all of this information may just sound like space mambo-jumbo, but it is another discovery in the world of space that could lead to the understanding of our universe. The final frontier may not be interesting to everyone, but understanding how the universe functions, and knowing what may come is fascinating. Plus, saying words like “supernova” and “quasar” is a lot of fun.