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.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      *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

      • chimerical@toast.ooo
        3·
        1 year ago

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

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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).

          • chimerical@toast.ooo
            1·
            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)