An artist's conception of the two colliding galaxies of the
4C60.07 system, each with a massive black hole at its center.
Our Milky Way galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its
core, as do most if not all other large galaxies in the modern
universe. These gravity wells can have masses of millions to
billions times that of the sun. Now, astronomers have more
support for the idea that such black holes are common among the
earliest galaxies going back to nearly the beginning of time. A
new study suggests galactic black holes were around even 12
billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.7 billion years
old and galaxies were just beginning to form, the astronomers
said. The new conclusion comes from the discovery of two distant
and interacting galaxies, both of which contain black holes at
their hearts that will most likely merge. The pair is 12 billion
light-years away, which means the light seen by astronomers left
the scene 12 billion years ago. (A light-year is the distance
light will travel in a