Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.

  • chimerical@toast.ooo
    3·
    1 year ago

    From my understanding they would still have a looong way to go before they would have evaporated.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I thought so too but apparently the length of time it takes a black hole to evaporate is based on mass and those with a low mass — as in, the mass of the moon — should have already evaporated. Only supermassive black holes are the ones likely to take a google years to evaporate.

      Edit: none of the ones pictured are that small. We probably couldn’t detect them for hundreds/thousands of years (e.g. until solar system sized telescopes).

      • chimerical@toast.ooo
        1·
        1 year ago

        According to this calculator a black hole the size of the moon would take 584,745,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. I’m always open to correction though. (5.84745E44)