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[DanMiller]

The image is cool.

ScienceAlert.com

 

 

From 13 billion light-years across the gulf of space and time, we've just caught a glimpse of the most distant black hole merger discovered yet.

 

Using JWST, an international team of astronomers has discovered two supermassive black holes, and their attendant galaxies, coming together in a colossal cosmic collision, just 740 million years after the Big Bang.

 

"Our findings suggest that merging is an important route through which black holes can rapidly grow, even at cosmic dawn," says astronomer Hannah Übler of the University of Cambridge in the UK.

 

"Together with other Webb findings of active, massive black holes in the distant Universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning."

 

 

[TOMDEY]

Here's how I like to visualize it >>> "Space-Time" is like the canvas upon which the stuff of the Universe is written. It has lumps and bumps caused by massive objects, but is at least reasonably flat in most places and most times enough to look rather familiarly flat. Very massive condensed objects warp that canvas enough to explain orbital mechanics... still locally familiar territory. But some places where mass is sufficiently concentrated, that concentration is sufficient to poke a hole right through the canvas "to somewhere somewhen else". If you try to paint that location with more mass --- it just drains in to wherever that other place is, and enlarging/bloating the hole even more ... with seemingly endless capacity. Which brings up the interesting challenge: Is there any way to plug up the hole? Hawking points out that it will eventually ~heal itself~ by naturally converting its mass to Hawking radiation, which dissipates back into our familiar Universe.

 

"Black holes with a mass equal to the Sun's would take 10⁶⁷ years to evaporate completely, or 'die'. That's 1 followed by 67 zeroes. For the supermassive black holes that we find at the centers of most galaxies, it could take as long as 10¹⁰⁰ years for them to evaporate, or 'die'." ~