NASA Finds Universe’s Biggest Ancient Black Holes, Can Change Everything People Know About Them

The American space agency, NASA, has reportedly detected the powerful gamma ray signals given off from a group of ancient galaxies. The gamma rays are being blasted out by blazars, objects that surround some of the most intense and massive black holes that have been observed until now.

According to Science Alert, the detection of the powerful gamma rays can change everything people know about how black holes formed in the primordial universe because the signals are being set off by galaxies that originated when the universe was just 1.4 billion years old. The signals from these ancient galaxies are being detected by the telescopes only now. Consequently, scientists are able to look back in time to know more about the oldest and biggest blazars and the black holes associated with them.

Blazars are located at the core of really active and enormous elliptical galaxies that have supermassive black holes that measure 1 million or more the times of the Sun's mass. When material falls into these black holes, they give off really intense streams of energy that move nearly at par to the speed of light. Moreover, when the streams of energy are pointed toward the planet Earth, they allow humans to understand more about the black holes that created them.

"Despite their youth, these far-flung blazars host some of the most massive black holes known," said Roopesh Ojha, astronomer from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "That they developed so early in cosmic history challenges current ideas of how supermassive black holes form and grow, and we want to find more of these objects to help us better understand the process."

Incidentally, NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope picked up the energy coming from the blazar. Additionally, the energy is coming from five galaxies whose origin can be traced back to a 1.4 billion years old primordial universe.