Black holes have baffled scientists for years now. While we are getting closer to decoding black holes with every research, they remain an enigma so far. Now, another such enigmatic black hole has popped up on scientists’ radar. What makes it special is that it is not only the brightest black hole that scientists have discovered so far, but also one of the hungriest black holes discovered so far.
Scientists from the Australian National University have discovered a super massive black hole that is gulping down a sun’s worth of gas and dust a day. This giant is located at the center of a quasar galaxy called J0529-4351 and it accretes, or in other word eats, around one solar mass per day. If you find that shocking, there’s more.
So far, this super massive black hole has eaten around 17 billion suns, which translates into roughly 2 × 10 ^41 Watts of energy, which makes it one of the brightest black holes discovered so far. For reference, this black hole is over 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun.
“We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion Suns, and eats just over a Sun per day. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe,” says Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and lead author of the study published today in Nature Astronomy, via the European Space Organisation.
Wait, there’s more.
Scientists believe that this super massive black hole is eating suns at such a speedy rate that it is extremely close to touching the maximum rate at which any black hole can feed while remaining stable.
Interestingly, this black hole is located in the centre of a quasar that was formed almost 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. For your reference, quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies and they are powered by supermassive black holes. Fortunately for us, this quasar is far away from milky way, which is why its light had to travel over 12 billion years to reach us. This also means that we are safe from this super hungry black hole.
Scientists don’t know much about this hungry black hole right now and as per a report by Science Alert, scientists plan to use Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array in Chile to study it further and find more such cosmic monsters.
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