Black holes have been abundant since the Big Bang

CNN : Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have determined that at least 30 million black holes had formed before the universe was 1 billion years old, quite early in the universe’s 13.7-billion-year history, writes Elizabeth Landau for CNN. Black holes are dense regions in space that have collapsed in on themselves; material in their vicinity gets drawn in, and as they devour that matter, they emit x-ray radiation. No one knows how the first black holes were formed after the Big Bang, nor which came first: the galaxy or the black hole. The Chandra observations indicate that proto-galaxies already had central black holes, but black holes and their galaxies appear to be growing together. In addition, “all the black holes we see at the centers of galaxies today are in a way descended from those baby black holes we see at the dawn of the universe,” said Kevin Schawinski of Yale University and coauthor of a study published in Nature. He and his coworkers plan to push even further into the early universe to gain more insights into the early black holes.