Astronomers have discovered that many of the supermassive black holes seen in the early universe are much larger than previously thought. The findings, published today in Nature, suggest that the earliest black holes may have grown more quickly than expected.

For years, astronomers have sought to understand how the earliest supermassive black holes formed in the early universe. Now, a team of international scientists has made a major breakthrough: they have discovered that many of these early black holes are much larger than previously thought. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the scientists were able to detect a number of black holes up to 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. The findings suggest that these supermassive black holes may have grown more quickly than previously predicted. It is now up to astronomers to understand how these monstrous objects could have formed in such a short amount of time.

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source: Phys.org