Unfeasibly large
It's Buster Gonad's missing third testicle.
Researchers from Australia and China have turned up an unfeasibly large black hole that almost dates back to the beginning of time. At 12 billion times the Sun's mass, and in a quasar that was a million billion times as energetic as the Sun, it's not actually the largest black hole ever spotted. However, its redshift indicates …
It's this kind of discovery that keeps science interesting. You think you understand something, then someone comes along and provides an example which pours cold water on your hot theory. Frustrating? You bet. But it gets the ol' grey matter going - and that's what gets the boffins out of bed in the morning.
The much vaunted physics-based red-shift data doesn't seem support the big bang theory either. That was the point of the article, wasn't it?
So, we have two ideas, neither of which conform to the science as we know it. Red-shift might be wrong for some reason, the instruments might be defective, the instruments might not be measuring what we think they are measuring, our understanding of the formation of black holes might be wrong, or our faith in the big-bang ex nihilo might be wrong, as it does, by definition break the laws of physics, which is what we use to study it. I'm sure there are other things which could also be wrong.
Hubris was the first mistake.
Rather than this being a completely unexplained/unexplainable black hole formed at the same time as the big bang, is it not much more likely that the big bang came from a black hole and this is the remains of it?
Black holes eject matter, we know this. If the big bang was a fast ejection of matter from a black hole that was many trillions the size of this one, and the rate of ejection is in some way proportional to its size, isn't it feasible that this black hole would still exist today, and just be a hell of a lot smaller?
Can anyone with more understanding of physics than me (99.9999999999% of the world, lol) tell me what would be wrong with this idea?
"If the big bang was a fast ejection of matter from a black hole that was many trillions the size of this one, and the rate of ejection is in some way proportional to its size, isn't it feasible that this black hole would still exist today, and just be a hell of a lot smaller?"
Nice idea, but no. In actual fact, the energy radiated by a black hole is inversely proportional to its size. While a black hole of the mass of, say, a mountain would probably shine brightly (if such primordial black holes even exist,) a huge one such as the one in this article would hardly emit any energy at all. I haven't done the sums (and the maths is probably beyond me) but I'm pretty sure that even a stellar-mass black hole that has existed for the entire age of the universe would not have shrunk appreciably. In fact it'll have grown due to swallowing up various particles that have come its way.
Black holes slowly evaporate via Hawking radiation which is basically invisible but stuff falling into black holes liberates huge quantities of energy (equivalent to more than 10 freshly toasted pop-tarts).
How gravity could suddenly stop such that a super-enormo-black-hole becomes a not-a-black-hole (ie the big bang) in less than 10^-36 seconds is somewhat theoretical. Even more theoretical would be how a black hole could 'bang' in such a cataclysmic manner (*) but still leave a black hole 'from which nothing can escape' ...
(*) is "cataclysmic" the correct term for creation of 'something' from 'nothing'?
The thrust of the article is a bit odd isn't it? "how can such an enormous accumulated mass have formed less than a billion years after the entire universe containing mass exploded?" It kind of assumes that the matter in this one came out of the first and then fell back together again. Since the further back in time we go the more ragged our models become it may well be that this BH formed via a different process to the one that occurs today.
"but stuff falling into black holes liberates huge quantities of energy"
It's worth noting that black holes tend to eat less than 3% of the matter falling from the accretion disk towards the event horizon with the rest fired off as jets from each pole.
They're messier eaters than Cookie Monster.
If you google: big bang predictions, or evidence against the big bang, you can find a massive list of astronomy discoveries which overly contradict the predictions of the big bang. This supermassive black hole that shouldn't be there has good company, like with the super-distant "mature" galaxies that shouldn't exist; the super-distant galaxy clustering that shouldn't exist, and the galaxy superclusters, all of which shouldn't exist, if the big bang theory were true, but do. (Along with A LOT of additional similar hard scientific evidence.)