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.
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There’s one right behind us, isn’t there?
The sky…it’s fulla holes.
There’s a mod joke in there somewhere.
something something landed gentry
Yep, we’re all gonna die when that thing gobbles us… In a few millions of years.
The things we see are from a millions years ago, who knows where or how big these are right now, might not even exist any more.
*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
From my understanding they would still have a looong way to go before they would have evaporated.
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).
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)
