An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of an incredibly voracious cosmic monster. Observations indicate that it is the fastest growing black hole ever identified.
A black hole with an insatiable appetite
With a mass 3 billion times greater than that of Sunthis gargantuan black hole feeds through a process known asaccretion, during which it sucks in the matter making up the disk of gas and dust surrounding it. While most of its siblings of similar size stopped growing billions of years ago, its appetite seems insatiable: It gobbles up the equivalent of a Earth each second.
In the context of work to be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, Christopher Onken and his colleagues determined that it is currently 500 times larger than Sagittarius A*a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way recently imaged. Even more impressive, they estimate that it could contain the entire Solar System behind its event horizona limit beyond which nothing can escape.
Based on this information, the team determined that it was the fastest growing cosmic monster in the past 9 billion years. Among the hypotheses considered to explain such voracity, Onken evokes the collision of two galaxies, which would have offered him an important reservoir of matter to siphon.
This rapid accretion of matter on the surface of the black hole also gave rise to a quasar remarkably bright. According to the researchers, this distant star-like body is 7,000 times brighter than all stars in the Earth. Milky Way.
An extremely luminous quasar
Designated SMSS J114447.77-430859.3, the quasar also turns out to be the brightest for the last two-thirds of the Universe’s 13.8 billion years of existence. Seen from the Earth, it presents a luminosity of magnitude 14.5, proving to be barely weaker than that of Pluto.
The black hole feeding it was detected using the 1.3 meter telescope at the Observatory of Siding Springin Australia. Due to the extreme luminosity of the quasar, Onken and his team likened this finding to finding ” a very large and improbable needle in a haystack “.
According Christian Wolf, co-author of the study, the odds of astronomers finding another black hole growing this fast or powering such a bright quasar are extremely low. ” There is hardly any part of the sky where objects like this could hide “, he underlines. ” It is unlikely that this record will ever be broken.. »
[related_posts_by_tax taxonomies=”post_tag”]
The post Discovery of the most voracious black hole in the Universe appeared first on Gamingsym.