The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Geek

Ah, the universe continues in its wonderful way always to be a little weirder than we thought.

1. Two separate studies say that

[i]ncredibly massive black holes had fully matured just a billion years after the birth of the universe,

Space.com reported back on November 23.

According to general relativity, gravity is caused by space - or, more accurately, spacetime - being warped by the presence of mass. Put a sufficient amount of mass in a sufficiently small volume of spacetime, and that spacetime is warped so much that even light can't get out. And then you have a black hole. For that reason, black holes obviously can't be detected directly; instead they're found and examined by their effect on space and matter surrounding them, particularly by the X-rays emitted by superheated gas spiralling in past a given black hole's "event horizon."

In a study announced today, a black hole catalogued as SDSSp J1306 appears to be about one billion times as massive as the sun. It is 12.7 billion light-years away, meaning the light just recorded - by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory - took 12.7 billion years to reach the vicinity of Earth.

The universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old.

A similarly massive and distant black hole was studied recently with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellite. The object, SDSSp J1030, is 12.8 billion light-years away. ...

How such massive and energetic structures formed so quickly remains a major puzzle for scientists. Mergers of smaller galaxies and their black holes may have played a role. Researchers suspect that black hole formation and galaxy development go largely hand-in-hand, but they cannot say which comes first.

2. So we have surprisingly old very massive black holes, and now we have surprisingly young galaxies. From the BBC for December 7:

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what may be the youngest galaxy ever seen in the Universe.

The spring chicken may be as young as 500 million years old - so recent that complex life had already arisen on Earth by the time it started to bloom.

Called I Zwicky 18, it has provided astronomers with a rare glimpse into what the Universe's first diminutive galaxies might have looked like. ...

This late bloomer, as viewed from Earth, seems to have undergone several sudden bursts of star formation; the earliest about 500 million years ago and the latest only 4 million years ago.

It's speculated that activity in a companion galaxy, such as supernovas, may have provided the initial energy to compress a cloud of hydrogen and helium, after which it's own internal gravity initiated the formation of stars in what became I Zwicky 18 (the name comes from a catalog of galaxies put together by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s).

At 45 million light years away, the new kid is in the neighborhood, as these things are reckoned.

Yuri Izotov, from the Kiev Observatory, Ukraine, called the finding "extraordinary".

"One would expect young galaxies to be forming only around the first billion years or so after the Big Bang, not some 13 billion years later," he said.

"Young galaxies were expected to be very distant, at the edge of the observable Universe, but not in the local Universe." ...

Though its primordial chemical make-up has long led astronomers to suspect I Zwicky 18 was a youngster, Hubble's sensitivity allowed astronomers to set an upper limit on the galaxy's age.

And so the much-maligned Hubble, which not long ago many were prepared to consign to the scrap heap, continues to prove its worth.