An international group led by astronomers at the National University of Australia (ANU) has found the fastest growing black hole in the last nine billion years.
Dr. Christopher Onken and Ph.D. the candidate Samuel Lai. Image credit: Jaime Kidston / ANU.
The black hole shines 7,000 times brighter than the rest of the light in the galaxy, providing access to backyard astronomers with the right equipment and consumes the equivalent of Earth every second.
The principal investigator, Dr. Christopher Onken and his co-authors, define it as a “very large, unexpected needle in the barn.”
Astronomers have been hunting objects like this for over 50 years. Thousands of others were found weaker, but this surprisingly bright one had gone unnoticed.
Dr. Christopher Onken, Principal Investigator at the National University of Australia
The black hole weighs three billion soles. Others of similar size stopped growing at such a rapid rate billions of years ago.
Now we want to know why this is different: Did something catastrophic happen? Perhaps two large galaxies crashed into each other, channeling a pile of material into the black hole to feed it.
Dr. Christopher Onken, Principal Investigator at the National University of Australia
Associate Professor Co-Author Christian Wolf said: “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.”
“We’re pretty sure this record won’t be broken. We’ve basically stayed out of the sky where objects like this could be hidden,” Wolf added.
The black hole has a visual magnitude of 14.5, the brightness of an object seen by an observer on Earth.
This means that anyone with a good telescope in a dark yard can see it.
“It’s 500 times bigger than the black hole in our galaxy,” he said. said researcher Samuel Lai.
“The orbits of the planets in our Solar System would fit within their horizon of events: the boundary of the black hole from which nothing can escape,” Lai added.
The research was conducted as part of the SkyMapper project.
Magazine reference:
Onken, CA, et al. (2022) Discovery of the brightest quasar of the last 9 Gyr. Astrophysics of galaxies. doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.04204.
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