what could be a groundbreaking discovery, astronomers have for the first time detected the fastest-growing black hole of the last nine billion years. This black hole is growing so fast that it consumes the equivalent of one Earth every second.
Astronomers from the Australian National University (ANU), describing it as a "very large, unexpected needle in the haystack", have said that the villainous object shines 7,000 times brighter than all the light from our own galaxy, making it visible to well-equipped backyard astronomers.submitted to Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. The object was identified by its optical colours from the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS) during a search for symbiotic binary stars.
"Astronomers have been hunting for objects like this for more than 50 years. They have found thousands of fainter ones, but this astonishingly bright one had slipped through unnoticed," Dr. Christopher Onken, lead researcher, said in a statement. He added that they now want to know why this one is different - did something catastrophic happen?
Researchers speculate that one of the reasons behind its massive size could be that two big galaxies crashed into each other, funneling a whole lot of material onto the black hole to feed it.black hole is formed from the death of a star with such a high gravitational field that the matter gets squeezed into the small space under it, trapping the light of the dead star. The gravity is so strong due to the matter being squeezed into a tiny space. Since no light can get out, people can't see black holes. They are invisible.The black hole identified by the Australian researchers has a visual magnitude of 14.5 - a measure of how bright an object appears to an observer on Earth. This means anyone with a decent telescope in a very dark backyard can see it comfortably. ANU Ph.D. researcher Samuel Lai, co-author of the study said "It is 500 times bigger than the black hole in our own galaxy. The orbits of the planets in our Solar System would all fit inside its event horizon - the black hole's boundary from which nothing can escape."Astronomers believe they have discovered the fastest-growing black hole of the past 9bn years.
The supermassive black hole consumes the equivalent of one Earth every second and has the mass of 3bn suns, they estimate.
Scientists discovered an extremely bright quasar, a luminous object powered by a supermassive black hole, using the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey – a 1.3-metre telescope in Coonabarabran, New South Wales.
The object – J114447.77-430859.3, or J1144 for short – is 7,000 times more luminous than all the light from the Milky Way.The light that we’re seeing from this growing black hole has been travelling to us for about 7bn years,” he said. The big bang occurred an estimated 13.8bn years ago.
J1144 was the most luminous quasar in the last 9bn years of cosmic history, the scientists found.
There are other similar sized black holes “but they all tend to be much earlier in the history of the universe where the mergers between galaxies was much more common”, Onken said.
The reason for J1144’s unusual luminosity is still unclear. “Maybe two big galaxies have collided and have funnelled a lot of gas in towards the black hole,” Onken said.
“People have been looking for these growing black holes since the early 1960s,” he said, adding that around 880,000 of them had been discovered and catalogued to date. “The fact that something so bright has escaped the many, many searches that have been conducted over the years is quite remarkable.”
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