The growth of giant black holes in the early Universe

This project aims to discover the largest black holes in the early universe and their origin, using the new Australian surveys SkyMapper and Taipan, and weigh them with infrared spectroscopy at Australia's new strategic partner, ESO. Giant black holes at the centres of galaxies reach masses over ten billion times that of our Sun. Surprisingly we have found such massive black holes already in the early universe, just 800 million years after the Big Bang; how did they grow to such mass The results will challenge either accretion theory for black holes or cosmology at large; they will also shed light at the evolution of galaxies in the early universe and prepare the ground for new work by other scientists, e.g. on the origin of elements.