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The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula

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JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe (www.quantamagazine.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

There's one right behind us, isn't there?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a mod joke in there somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

something something landed gentry

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The sky...it's fulla holes.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep, we're all gonna die when that thing gobbles us... In a few millions of years.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

*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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From my understanding they would still have a looong way to go before they would have evaporated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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)