Artist print of a rapidly expanding supermassive black hole from afar. (Image credit: Shutterstock) (opens in a new tab)
Astronomers have detected the brightest, fastest-growing black hole that has existed in the last 9 billion years. The huge cosmic entity is 3 billion times more massive than the ground and swallows one Earth-measure a piece of matter every second.
The new supermassive black hole, known as J1144, is about 500 times as Sagittarius A *, the supermassive black hole in the heart of the Milky Waywhich was recently photographed for the first time. A superheated plasma ring around the huge vacuum also emits about 7,000 times more light than our entire galaxy.
Australian astronomers discovered the cosmic giant using data from the National University of Australia’s SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, which aims to trace the entire sky to the southern hemisphere. Locating the supermassive black hole was like finding a “very large, unexpected needle in the barn,” according to researchers. he said in a statement (opens in a new tab).
“Astronomers have been hunting objects like this for more than 50 years,” said lead researcher Christopher Onken, an astronomer at the National University of Australia (ANU) in Canberra. “They’ve found thousands of weaker ones, but this surprisingly bright one had gone unnoticed.”
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The voracious appetite of the black hole outweighs that of other equally large supermassive black holes. The growth rates of these huge cosmic entities are usually declining as they become more massive, according to the statement. This is probably due to the increase in Hawking radiation: thermal radiation that is theorized to be released from black holes due to the effects of quantum mechanics.
The new black hole eats so much matter that its horizon of events, the boundary beyond which nothing, including light, can escape, is unusually wide. “The orbits of our planets solar system it would all fit within its horizon of events, “ANU astronomer Samuel Lai said in a statement.
A close-up conceptual image of the accretion disk of a black hole. (Image credit: Shutterstock) (opens in a new tab)
Black holes cannot be seen because they do not emit any light. But astronomers can detect black holes because they are intense gravity attracts matter to the event horizon so quickly that it becomes super hot plasma; this emits light in a ring around the black hole, called the accretion disk. The newly discovered giant’s accretion disk is the brightest astronomers have ever detected, due to its massive event horizon and the extreme speed at which it attracts matter. Researchers are “pretty sure” that this is a record that will never be broken, according to the statement.
The boundary of the black hole is so bright that even amateur astronomers could see it with a sufficiently powerful telescope trained exactly on the right side of the sky, the researchers said.
The team is now trying to determine why the massive black hole is still so unusually hungry for matter. Scientists suspect that a catastrophic cosmic event must be responsible for the birth of this gigantic void. “Perhaps two large galaxies crashed into each other, channeling a lot of material into the black hole to feed it,” Onken said.
However, it can be difficult to find out exactly how it was formed. Researchers are skeptical that we will ever find another equally massive and rapidly expanding black hole, making it difficult to prove a general theory about the formation of such voracious cosmic objects.
“This black hole is so unusual that even though you should never say it, I don’t think we’ll find another one like this,” said co-author Christian Wolf, ANU astronomer and leader of the group. SkyMapper. “We’ve basically run out of sky where objects like this could be hidden.”
However, some researchers predict that there are as many as 40 quintillion black holes in the universewhich could account for about 1% of all matter in the universe, so the chances of there being an even more devastating black hole somewhere are not zero.
The study was submitted on June 8 to the prepress database arXiv but has not yet been peer-reviewed. If accepted, it will be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
Originally published in Live Science.