Thread: Chandra reveals earliest black holes were supermassive

Article: Astronomers discover earliest black holes at the dawn of the universe

Not only that, but these black holes, just a few hundred million years old, were already supermassive in size:

“These observations indicate that extremely massive black holes already existed as early as 700 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which suggests that either they were born massive to start with, or they experienced rapid growth bursts,” Natarajan said

Well, I have no idea what mechanism it is that starts the black holes, but it does make sense that there were already supermassive black holes in the early universe.

Also that they would grow much more rapidly than today's black holes. Because the universe is less dense now than it was just 700 million years after the big bang.
(they just dont make em like they used to)

I dont see how a black hole could be massive from the beginning. Can the singularity inside black holes vary greatly in size?

Originally Posted by Joe McCarron

I dont see how a black hole could be massive from the beginning. Can the singularity inside black holes vary greatly in size?

No. Many folks confuse a black hole's singularity with its event horizon. The singularity is located at the center of a black hole, and is where the curvature of space and time become infinite. For a non-rotating black hole, the singularity is a point. For a rotating black hole, the singularity is smeared out as a ring in the plane of rotation. Neither has any volume. Since it can be shown that all of a black hole's mass is concentrated in the singularity, it holds that the singularity has infinite density.

The event horizon, on the other hand, is simply the outer shell of the black hole beyond which neither matter nor light can escape. More aptly put, it's the point beyond which all possible light paths only point further into the black hole.