Sydney May 15 (TNS): Australian scientists claimed to have discovered the fastest growing black hole known in the universe.
According to ABC news report, it is growing at a rate of 1 percent every 1 million years, and it is so big it is consuming a mass equivalent to our Sun every two days.
Dr. Christian Wolf and his team at the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics have found a monster.
At the occasion, Dr. Wolf said “What’s really important in this business is now to actually find the most massive ones because they are the hardest ones to explain”.
Supermassive black holes — or quasars — are hard to find among the billions of stars in the universe.
The ultra-violet light emitted from the quasar was detected by the Sky Mapper telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory.
There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, but compared to this one, it’s a lightweight.
“That one has a mass of 5 million solar masses — that is 40,000 times less mass than the one that we have now found,” Wolf says.
“We estimate that this black hole has a mass of at least 20 billion times the mass of the Sun.”
And it’s a good thing this monster black hole isn’t at the center of our Milky Way.
As well as its ravenous appetite, it would likely emit so many X-rays, life probably couldn’t exist.
But don’t panic — Dr. Wolf says it won’t suck us in.
“We don’t have to be afraid of that. It is very far away,” he says.
“The light has traveled for 12 billion years until it reached us and we were now able to see this.
“So this means it’s far, far away in another galaxy and it will never drift and come over here.”
This supermassive quasar was around when the 13.8-billion-year-old universe was only about 1.2 billion years old.
That’s a puzzle for scientists, who don’t understand how quasars grew so big, so early in the history of the universe.
Professor Tamara Davis, an astrophysicist at the University of Queensland, says it has implications for our understanding of how it all began.
“There’s a big mystery about how these supermassive black holes form because we don’t understand how something could get that big that quickly; our normal theories don’t work,” she says.
“And it might mean that there were seeds to these black holes in the very early universe.
“During the birth of the universe, some really massive seeds were created that these black holes then formed around.
“So, it actually has implications for how the universe began and what mechanism triggered the big bang.
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The findings have been accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA).
