Astronomers detect vast amounts of gas and dust around black hole in early universe
Monday, April 2, 2012 - 10:05
in Astronomy & Space
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the IRAM array of millimetre-wave telescopes in the French Alps, a team of European astronomers from Germany, the UK and France have discovered a large reservoir of gas and dust in a galaxy that surrounds the most distant supermassive black hole known. Light from the galaxy, called J1120+0641, has taken so long to reach us that the galaxy is seen as it was only 740 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 1/18th of its current age. Team leader Dr. Bram Venemans of the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany presented the new discovery at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester.