Super black hole 20 billion times larger than the Sun "eats" stars continuously
Astronomers have discovered the fastest growing supermassive black hole in the universe, swallowing a star the mass of the Sun every two days.
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Simulation of a black hole glowing while eating stars. Illustration:NASA. |
The voracious monster black hole was discovered when the team looked at a region of space 12 billion light years away. They were able to see the supermassive black hole because it was unusually bright. If the supermassive black hole were located in the Milky Way, it would appear brighter than 10 full moons from Earth, outshining all the stars in the night sky, according toScience Alert. The research results were published in the journal arXiv.org.
Scientists estimate that the newly discovered supermassive black hole, called QSO SMSS J215728.21-360215.1, is 20 billion times more massive than the Sun and is growing at a rate of 1% every million years. "The black hole is growing so fast that it is thousands of times brighter than an entire galaxy, because all the gas it sucks in every day creates a lot of friction and heat," said Christian Wolf, a scientist at the Australian National University (ANU), who worked on the study.
The supermassive black hole could wipe out all life on Earth due to the X-rays it emits as it sucks in matter. Because so much matter is sucked in, it is classified as a quasar, one of the rarest and brightest objects found at the center of galaxies. The quasar was identified using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope and ANU's SkyMapper telescope.
So far, very few quasars and supermassive black holes of this size have been found. The challenge for researchers is to figure out how these objects could have grown so incredibly fast in the early universe.