Black hole a window to universe

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IT WAS created almost at the beginning of time and could hold clues to how galaxies evolve.

       Now astronomers have snapped a picture of a "super-massive" back hole at the very edge of the universe--12.8 billion light-years from Earth.

       The dark star -- which cannot be seen by eye because it is so dense that light cannot escape its gravitational pull -- is a billion times more massive than our Sun and lies within a galaxy the size of the Milky Way.

       Scientists believe the universe was created in the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. That means the latest black hole was born less than a billion years later, when the universe was only a 16th as big as it is today.

     By comparison, our own Sun is a baby at just 4.5 billion years old.

     To see the super-massive black hole, scientists at the Subaru telescope in Hawaii used new red-sensitive digital camera technology to photograph heat radiation generated by matter falling into the black hole at great speed.

     " It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the Sun," University of Hawaii astromer Dr Tomotsugu Goto said.

     Scientists hope the new images will explain how galaxies and black holes have evolved together.

     " We have witnessed a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy forming together," project team member Yousuke Utsumi said. "This discovery opened a window for investigating the dawn of the universe."

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Rules of attraction (note: for reference)

* Black holes form when giant stars - three or more times bigger than our sun - run out of nuclear fuel and collapse under their own gravitational force

* The black hole's matter if concentrated at a single point in its centre, called the singularity

* The gravitational force becomes so strong nothing can escape from it, not even light

* One theory is that super-massive black holes form by swallowing up enormouse amounts of matter over the course of millions of years

* Another possibility is that a cluster of black holes forms and eventually merges

* Scientists believe that most galaxies have a super massive black hole at the centre