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.

  • 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)