~THINKING IS DANGEROUS~
Artist's impression of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant quasar. Scientists believe they have discovered one whose mass is 12 billion times that of our sun's. Photograph: Zhaoyu Li/Shanghai Astronomical/Peking University/PA
Thinking is dangerous.
Thinking can create questions
in our mind and can make us
doubt what we believed to be the
truth about the world we live in.
If a frog living in a pond,
starts thinking, it might come to
doubt it's belief that the pond was
the entire world and may feel
foolish for thinking that the pond
was the entire world and nothing
existed beyond the pond.
We could feel like the frog when
we start thinking about our world
and start asking questions about
our world we live in – the Universe.
With our limited tools to sense things
that exist in the universe, we try to know
about things around us like galaxies
full of billions of stars like our Sun.
We can sense light and can see
the things that emit or reflect light.
Powerful telescopes gave us a picture
of the visible universe and now
ability to sense x-rays has added
very important missing parts in
our knowledge about the universe.
With telescope to see visible light
we saw things getting swallowed by
the black holes but sensing x-rays
told us that black holes were not
the destroyers of Galaxies but
actually mothers of the galaxies,
with their extremely powerful
emission of x-rays providing the
energy and power for the creation
of the galaxies and giving birth to them.
Compared to the expanding knowledge
about universe can make us feel like
fools for believing in all those made up
stories about the origin of the Universe
and how the world was created and
passing on the stories to our Children,
generation after generation, how
our world was created.
We still do not know so many things
about the Universe and more we know,
more we feel so much more we need to know
but it is better to know small
amount of truth about Universe than
to believe in make believe stories
about the origin of the universe with
so many variations in the imaginations
used to make up those make believe stories.
Kris ~ Dreamweaver
www.poetrypoem.com/dreamweaver
NOTE:Press Association
Thursday 26 February 2015 00.35 GMT
A monster black hole powering "the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe" has been discovered that is 12bn times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.
The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar - an intensely powerful galactic radiation source - with a million billion times the sun's energy output.
For years the nature of quasars, discovered in 1963, remained a mystery. Today scientists believe they are generated by matter heating up as it is dragged into supermassive black holes at the centre of distant galaxies.
The new object, named SDSS J0100+2802, is 12.8bn light years from Earth and was formed just 900m years after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.
Astronomers cannot explain how such an enormous black hole could have formed so early in cosmic history, soon after the first stars and galaxies emerged.
Dr Fuyan Bian, from the Australian National University, a member of the international team, said: "Forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with current theories ...
"This black hole at the centre of the quasar gained enormous mass in a short period of time."
The quasar, the brightest ever detected in the early universe, was found after astronomers conducted a survey of distant luminous objects using data from several large telescopes around the world.
It had a "redshift" - a measurement of the stretching of light to the red end of the spectrum by the expansion of the universe - of 6.30, marking it out as a very distant and old object.
Only 40 known quasars have a redshift higher than six, the yardstick used to define the early universe boundary.
It was formed soon after the end of the "epoch of reionisation", a transformative era that ended the "cosmic dark age" following the Big Bang and created the star-filled universe we know today.
Astronomers have uncovered more than 200,000 quasars dating as far back as 700m years after the Big Bang. Despite their high luminosity they are extremely faint because of their great distance and difficult to find.
Professor Xue-Bing Wu, from Peking University in China, who led the study reported in the journal Nature, said: "This quasar is very unique. We are so excited, when we found that there is such a luminous and massive quasar only 0.9bn years after the Big Bang. Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early universe."
US co-author Dr Yuri Beletsky, from the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, said: "This quasar is a unique laboratory to study the way that a quasar's black hole and host galaxy co-evolve. Our findings indicate that in the early universe, quasar black holes probably grew faster than their host galaxies, although more research is needed to confirm this idea."
The quasar's black hole dwarfs the one at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which has mass of three million suns.
• The headline of this article was amended to clarify that the black hole is 12bn times more massive than the sun, rather than 12bn times bigger.
