Powerful, nearby black holes could help to explain universe's origins
By Doris Elin Salazar published about 13 hours ago
Could a black hole reveal clues about the Epoch of Reionization?
The Haro 11 galaxy. Like Tololo 0440-381, this nearby galaxy gives off a type of radiation that scientists think resembles the characteristics of the earliest stars in the universe. Haro 11 is about 300 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble/ESO and NASA)
Nearby galaxies and their black holes could hold the answers to the existential questions that remain unanswered about the beginning of the universe.
A black hole within a nearby galaxy called Tol 0440-381 shines about one million times brighter than the sun, researchers from the University of Iowa found in a new study. This object suggests that powerful black holes could have played a major role in cosmic evolution, the team asserts in this work.
These earliest stars were behemoths, about 30 to 300 times as massive as our sun and millions of times as bright, according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. These powerful stellar furnaces burned for only a few million years before exploding as supernovae.
Hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, the universe was transparent for some time but had no stars. These dark ages ended about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when the first stars began to form and light flooded the young cosmos.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/nearby-black-holes-could-explain-universe-origin
