Sydney May 15 (TNS): Australian scientists claimed to have discovered the fastest growing black hole known in the universe.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Dr. Christian Wolf and his team at the Australian National University\u2019s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics have found a monster.<\/p>\n
At the occasion, Dr.\u00a0Wolf said\u00a0“What’s really important in this business is now to actually find the most massive ones because they are the hardest ones to explain”.<\/p>\n
Supermassive black holes \u2014 or quasars \u2014 are hard to find among the billions of stars in the universe.<\/p>\n
The ultra-violet light emitted from the quasar was detected by the Sky Mapper telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory.<\/p>\n
There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, but compared to this one, it’s a lightweight.<\/p>\n
“That one has a mass of 5 million solar masses \u2014 that is 40,000 times less mass than the one that we have now found,” Wolf says.<\/p>\n
“We estimate that this black hole has a mass of at least 20 billion times the mass of the Sun.”<\/p>\n
And it’s a good thing this monster black hole isn’t at the center of our Milky Way.<\/p>\n
As well as its ravenous appetite, it would likely emit so many X-rays, life probably couldn’t exist.<\/p>\n
But don’t panic \u2014 Dr. Wolf says it won’t suck us in.<\/p>\n
“We don’t have to be afraid of that. It is very far away,” he says.<\/p>\n
“The light has traveled for 12 billion years until it reached us and we were now able to see this.<\/p>\n
“So this means it’s far, far away in another galaxy and it will never drift and come over here.”<\/p>\n
This supermassive quasar was around when the 13.8-billion-year-old universe was only about 1.2 billion years old.<\/p>\n
That’s a puzzle for scientists, who don’t understand how quasars grew so big, so early in the history of the universe.<\/p>\n
Professor Tamara Davis, an astrophysicist at the University of Queensland, says it has implications for our understanding of how it all began.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“And it might mean that there were seeds to these black holes in the very early universe.<\/p>\n
“During the birth of the universe, some really massive seeds were created that these black holes then formed around.<\/p>\n