(Photo : Getty Images)

Human interest is piqued by those things which are inaccessible to us. Black holes may then be on top of that list. Black holes are cold vestiges of former stars. They have immense density, so much so that not even light is able to escape them. Ironically, their name implies an absence of anything, but do not be fooled: a black hole has intense gravitational pull that does not let particles or electromagnetic radiation escape from it. It is an incredibly massive entity that covers a small area.

Recently the discovery of a black hole that is 12 billion times more massive than the sun has put everyone in bewilderment. The new black hole has been discovered by an international team of collaborators from Peking University, China.

The scientists were initially reluctant to classify it as a black hole because it was too bright, its luminosity equal to the brightness of 420 trillion suns. Most of the people do not believe black holes to be bright, though they can be. This is particularly so because black holes suck everything inside them but just before that there is tremendous friction which produces a lot of light. If the explanation is taken as correct then one can only fathomat how massive and incredible intense this black hole is. Its presence has been confirmed by much bigger and more powerful telescopes that were setup for this purpose in Chile, Arizona and Huawei.

Scientists are also perplexed as to how such a massive black hole could be formed in such a short time i.e. just 900 million years after the Big Bang. The current theories fail to explain the formation of a massive black hole in short time. This has also led the scientists to question that whether it was really the Big Bang that created the universe? If the findings are correct then they pose an important question over the Big Bang theory.