Astronomers think they have discovered the black hole that has grown the fastest in the last 9 billion years. They predict that the supermassive black hole eats the equivalent of one Earth every second and has a mass of 3 billion suns.
Using the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey — a 1.3-meter telescope in Coonabarabran, New South Wales – scientists detected an incredibly bright quasar, a blazing object driven by a supermassive black hole.J114447.77-430859.3, or J1144 for short, is 7,000 times brighter than all of the Milky Way’s brightness combined.
The supermassive black hole was “more or less halfway across the universe,” according to lead scientist Dr. Christopher Onken of the Australian National University.
“The light from this expanding black hole has been coming to us for nearly 7 billion years,” he explained. The big bang has various aspects involved 13.8 billion years ago.
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The scientists discovered that J1144 was the most bright quasar in the last 9 billion years of cosmic history.
According to Onken, other black holes of similar size exist, but “they all tend to be considerably earlier in the known universe where galactic mergers were far more prevalent,” according to Onken.
The cause of J1144’s exceptional brightness is unknown. “Perhaps two large galaxies collided, funneling a lot of gas around towards the black hole,” Onken speculated.
“People have been seeking for these developing black holes since the early 1960s,” he said, saying that some 880,000 have been identified and compiled to date. “It’s rather astounding something so bright has eluded the many, many studies that have been undertaken throughout the years.”
It’s possible that the reason J1144 has avoided finding it for so long is due to its location in the night sky. “Historically, people have resisted looking very near to the Milky Way age plane since there are so many stars, so many pollutants, that it would be very difficult to identify something farther,” Onken explained.
“Some studies have ceased looking at 25 degrees or 20 degrees out from the Milky Way’s plane. This source is at an angle of 18 degrees.”
While black holes are invisible – their gravity is so strong that not even light can escape them – the stuff that spirals around them makes them visible. Black holes are “very, very messy eaters,” according to Dr. Fiona Panther, a gravitational wave astrophysicist at the University of Western Australia who was not involved in the research. “If there’s a lot of gas and dust being thrown onto the black hole, it will really spit a lot of material out,” she said.
“It’ll frequently spit out in huge jets… “Quasars are a form of black hole jet,” she explained.
Panther claims that a supermassive black hole exists at the core of almost every galaxy in the universe. When nothing can leave beyond the event horizon, black holes “have no special suction power outside their gravitational potential to drag objects towards them,” according to Onken.”If you shrink the sun into a black hole, we’d be in the continuous night, but the movements of the planets around the sun wouldn’t alter anything because the weight hasn’t changed.”
“Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole that is 4 million times the size of the sun,” Onken added.
“It’ll frequently spit out in huge jets… “Quasars are a form of black hole jet,” she explained.
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Panther claims that a supermassive black hole exists at the core of almost every galaxy in the universe.
When nothing can leave further than the event horizon, black holes “have no special suction power outside their gravitational potential to drag objects towards them,” according to Onken.”If you shrink the sun into a black hole, we’d be in the continuous night, but the movements of the planets around the sun wouldn’t alter anything because the weight hasn’t changed.”
“Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole that is 4 million times the size of the sun,” Onken added.
A Handy Galactic Tool
The uncommon find, according to Dr. Cowley, could provide tantalizing hints about the birth and development of galaxies.
“This is because the supermassive black holes and its host galaxy’s many features are linked.”We can comprehend the galaxy and vice versa by researching black holes.”
While J1144 is outside the Milky Way, its proximity to it, according to Dr. Cowley, could make it a useful resource for studying how gas travels in and out of our own galaxy.
“If you think of the Milky Way as a spiraling disc galaxy with a very flat disc, the place where they found this item is pretty close to the disc of the galaxy,” Dr. Cowley explained.
Dr. Onken and his crew also want to figure out what spawned the gigantic J1144 in the first place, as well as what has been lying in plain sight.
“We do not even know if this item is a late bloomer or if it’s been able to throw all this gas towards the black hole to feed it because of some massive galaxy collision,” he said.
“This has spurred a fresh phase of investigation to investigate what other items have been overlooked by all the surveys throughout the years,” says the researcher.
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