NPR: “James Webb Telescope detects earliest known black hole — it's really big for its age”

PSI Blog 20240129 NPR: “James Webb Telescope detects earliest known black hole — it's really big for its age”

 

Yet another elderly object is found in the cosmogonical crib.

 

“This image shows a 'close-up' of the galaxy GN-z11 as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, superimposed on top of another image marking the galaxy's location in the sky.” NASA

 

Here we go again: As we look increasingly distant into what cosmologists assume to be the Big Bang universe, we are supposed to see increasingly young cosmological structures. Not so. Black holes are the nuclei of galaxies. They becoming increasingly large when their associated stars are pushed therein. This takes an extremely long time.

 

Our own Milky Way has an extremely tiny black hole, containing an equivalent of “only” 4.3 million solar masses. With an estimated 400 billion stars, that is about 0.001% of the mass of the entire galaxy. The Milky Way is 13.61 Ga (i.e., 13.61 billion years old). At that rate, it looks like it would take trillions of years for all those stars to be pushed into the nucleus.

 

“James Webb Telescope detects earliest known black hole — it's really big for its age”

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1225153504/james-webb-telescope-detects-earliest-known-black-hole-its-really-big-for-its-ag

 

You might like this link for it has a podcast to go along with the transcript. Here are a few telling quotes from Ari Daniel, the interviewer:

 

“When the Hubble Space Telescope first spotted the galaxy GN-z11 in 2016, it was the most distant galaxy scientists had ever identified. It was ancient, formed 13.4 billion years ago — a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang.”

 

Daniel quotes the author: "It is essentially not possible to grow such a massive black hole so fast so early in the universe," Maiolino says. "Essentially, there is not enough time according to classical theories. So one has to invoke alternative scenarios."

 

Ad Hoc Time

 

Then come the ad hocs we have been waiting for. Daniel says:

 

“Here's scenario one — rather than starting out small, perhaps supermassive black holes in the early universe were simply born big due to the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas.”

 

“Scenario two is that maybe early stars collapsed to form a sea of smaller black holes, which could have then merged or swallowed matter way faster than we thought, causing the resulting black hole to grow quickly.”

 

“Or perhaps it's some combination of both.”

 

These perhaps are no more absurd than the numerous ad hocs already used to save the Big Bang Theory. Like the others, if repeated enough they might become the illusory truth. 

 

 

PSI Blog 20240129

 

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