Discovery of the "hungriest" black hole in the universe

Astronomers have discovered a bizarre black hole that is devouring gas from a nearby star at a rate 10 times faster than previously thought.

Black hole P13 is absorbing a mass equivalent to 100 billion billion sausages every minute. Photo: ICRAR

The hungry black hole, nicknamed P13, is located on the outskirts of the galaxy NGC7793, about 12 million light-years from Earth. Researchers discovered that black hole P13 is absorbing a mass equivalent to 100 billion billion sausages every minute.

Dr Roberto Soria, an expert at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) working at the ICRAR facility at Curtin University (Australia), said that because gas is being sucked towards a black hole, it is very hot and bright. Scientists initially noticed P13 because it was much brighter than other black holes, but thought that this black hole was simply larger than usual.

"We have long believed that the maximum speed at which a black hole can swallow gas and produce light depends closely on its size. So it is understandable that people conclude that P13 is larger than the normal, less luminous black holes we observe in our galaxy, the Milky Way," Dr. Soria explained.

When Soria and his colleagues from the University of Strasbourg in France measured P13’s mass, they discovered that it was actually small, despite being at least a million times brighter than the sun. Only then did the team realize how much material the black hole was absorbing.

According to Soria, P13 orbits a supermassive “donor” star, more than 20 times the mass of our Sun. Scientists observed that one side of the star was always brighter than the other, because it was illuminated by X-rays emitted from P13’s black hole. As a result, the star appeared to get brighter or dimmer as it moved around P13.

This allowed the team to measure how long it took for the black hole and the donor star to orbit each other (about 64 days) and to model the velocities of the two objects as well as the shape of their orbits.

According to Daily Mail