Biggest Black Hole Blast Ever Could Solve Cosmological Mystery

Biggest Black Hole Blast Ever Could Solve Cosmological Mystery

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Astronomers have seen a distant galaxy that blasts away material with two trillion times the energy the sun emits — the biggest such eruption ever seen. That ejection of matter could answer an important question about the universe: why are the black holes in the centers of galaxies so light?

Computer models of the early universe usually produce a virtual cosmos that looks like ours except for one thing. The ratio of the mass of black holes in galaxy centers to the rest of the matter in galaxies is larger in the simulations than in the real universe. Scientists think somehow galaxies are ridding themselves of much of the mass that would have ended up falling into their central black holes. However, until now researchers have been at a lack for an explanation of how this might happen.