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Astronomers have discovered a brighter and faster growing black hole over the past 9 billion years. The massive cosmic entity is three billion times larger than the sun and swallows countryThe particle size of a substance per second.
The new supermassive black hole, known as J1144, is about 500 times the size of the supermassive black hole at the core of Sagittarius A*. Milky WayThat was recently photographed for the first time. A ring of superheated plasma around the massive vacuum emits about 7,000 times more bright across our galaxy.
Australian astronomers have discovered the cosmic force using data from the Australian National University’s SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, which aims to map the entire sky in the Southern Hemisphere. Locating the supermassive black hole, the researchers said, is like searching for “a very large and unexpected needle in a haystack.” He said in a statement (Opens in a new tab).
“Astronomers have been searching for things like this for more than 50 years,” lead researcher Christopher Onken, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said in the statement. “They found thousands of faint ones, but this incredible brilliance went unnoticed.”
Related: The discovery of the ancestors of an extremely rare black hole in the beginning of the universe
The insatiable appetite of a black hole dwarfs that of similar massive black holes. The growth rates of these massive cosmic entities usually slow as they become more massive, the statement said. This is likely due to an increase in Hawking radiation – thermal radiation is believed to be emitted due to the effects of black holes Quantum mechanics.
The newly discovered black hole is devouring so much matter that its event horizon – the limit from which nothing, including light, can escape – is unusually wide. The orbits of the planets in our area Solar System Co-author Samuel Lay, an astronomer at ANU, said in the statement:
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Black holes cannot be seen because they do not emit light. But astronomers can detect black holes based on their severity weight It pulls matter toward the event horizon so fast that it turns into a super-hot plasma; This light is emitted in a ring around the black hole, the so-called accretion disk. The newly discovered giant accretion disk is the brightest disk astronomers have ever discovered, due to its massive event horizon and the extreme velocity at which it pulls in matter. The statement said the researchers are “fairly confident” that this is a record that will not be broken.
The researchers said the black hole’s boundary is so bright that even amateur astronomers can see it with a powerful enough telescope aimed at the right part of the sky.
The team is now trying to figure out why the supermassive black hole is thirsty for matter. Scientists believe that a catastrophic cosmic event must have been responsible for creating this massive void. “Maybe two large galaxies collided and dumped a large amount of material into the black hole to feed it,” Onken said.
However, it can be difficult to know exactly how they formed. Researchers suspect that we will find another massive and rapidly expanding black hole, which makes it difficult to test a general theory about the formation of such insatiable cosmic bodies.
Co-author Christian Wolf, an astronomer at ANU and leader of the SkyMapper group, said in the statement. “We basically ran from heaven where things like this might be hiding.”
However, some researchers speculate that there are up 40 trillion black holes in the universewhich can make up about 1% of all matter in the universe, so the probability of a more massive black hole somewhere is nonzero.
The study was submitted to a prepress data processor on June 8 arXiv But no peer review has been conducted yet. If accepted, it will be published in the editions of the Australian Astronomical Society.
Originally published on Live Science.
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