英語聽力：黑洞吞噬—6

The mystery of what could count for the quasars' extraordinary brightness was the hot topic in astronomy during the 1960s. As astronomers began to grapple with the new enigmatic objects that had been found by the radio telescopes, one astronomer, keen to have a crack at the problem, was a young researcher, called Donald Lynden-Bell.

The sky looked totally different in the radio than it looked in the optical. And that was a big problem and the question was what were these things?

While his colleagues were staring down telescopes, Lynden-Bell approached the problem through theory. He wanted to find out how something as small as a quasar could possibly be so bright.

This had an enormous quantity of energy coming out of it and it came from a very small size. Now putting these numbers together, one could already see the mass of the energy required to give the emission was like ten million times the mass of the sun.

But the problem was that quasars are tiny in size, were nothing like the scale of ten million suns. Lynden-Bell realizes there was only one thing that could possibly be so small yet have so much mass--those mathematical anomalies conjured up by theorists that had been predicted but never observed—super-massive black holes.