In 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 (A NU), 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.
Their findings have been published to arXiv and submitted to Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. The object was identified by its optical color from the Sky Mapper 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 On Ken, 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 lot of material onto the black hole to feed it.
A 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. A UN Ph.D. researcher Samuel Lie, 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 had recently captured the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Sagittarius A*. The team used an Earth-sized telescope to capture the black hole. SGR A* is located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy and is 27,000 light-years away from us.
The Australian researchers are confident that their record will not be broken, saying "We have essentially run out of the sky where objects like this could be hiding."
Black holes, the dark abyss found at the center of every galaxy with such strong gravity that even light does not escape, have fascinated astronomers the world over. Stars that are born with a mass that is more than 20 times that of the Sun end up becoming black holes as it collapses.
NASA has been studying these unique mysterious objects in detail trying to understand their nature and how they play a part in the evolution of galaxies. The American space agency has now released visuals of 22 such objects in our Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
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