Brightest, hungriest black hole ever discovered: Terrifying void swallows one sun every day, scientists say
Astronomers have found the brightest object in the universe: a ‘hellish’ black hole that consumes a star a day.
The black hole, described as ‘the most hellish place in the universe’, is located 12 billion light-years away and has a mass roughly 17 billion times that of the sun in our solar system.
Because of their enormous gravity, black holes grow in mass by capturing nearby material, be it stars, planets, and even other black holes.
The matter pulled into this black hole, known as J0529-4351, forms a huge disk seven light-years in diameter.
That’s about 15,000 times the distance from the Sun to Neptune.
All galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their core. When the influx of gas and dust into this black hole reaches a certain level, the event can cause a ‘quasar’ to form: an extremely bright region as the material swirls around the black hole. The photo shows an artist’s impression of the record-breaking quasar J0529-4351
J0529-4351 was identified by a team from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia, led by Associate Professor Christian Wolf.
“Hell is presented as an extremely uncomfortable place, hot and hostile to corporeal forms of human life,” he said.
‘Thanks to a massive astronomical survey of the entire sky, we have now found perhaps the most hellish place in the universe.’
According to Professor Wolf, you “don’t have to be afraid” of a black hole like this, especially since it is 12 billion light years away.
“The light from this monster took more than 12 billion years to reach us, which means it would have stopped growing long ago,” he said.
Taking into account that the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old, the light we now observe from the black hole is a snapshot of the universe in its ‘adolescent’ phase.
“In the adolescent universe, matter moved chaotically, feeding hungry black holes,” the academic explained.
‘Today, stars move orderly at safe distances and only rarely plunge into black holes.
‘In the nearby universe we see that supermassive black holes are now mainly sleeping giants.’
When the influx of gas and dust into this black hole reaches a certain level, the event can cause a ‘quasar’ to form: an extremely bright region as the material swirls around the black hole. This image shows a large area of the region around quasar J0529-4351
Known as the inspiration for science fiction films like ‘Event Horizon’, black holes are regions of spacetime where the pull of gravity is so strong that not even light can get out.
They act as intense sources of gravity that suck in surrounding dust and gas, as well as planets and even other black holes.
They are often described as ‘destructive monsters’ because they tear stars apart, eat anything that comes too close and trap light.
This black hole – the fastest growing black hole ever recorded – was first detected with a 2.3 meter telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near the town of Coonabarabran, about 480 kilometers from Sydney.
The research team then used one of the largest telescopes in the world – the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope – to confirm the full nature of the black hole and measure its mass.
When the influx of gas and dust into this black hole reaches a certain level, the event can cause a ‘quasar’ to form: an extremely bright region as the material swirls around the black hole.
This black hole was first detected with a 2.3 meter telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, Australia (photo)
Black holes act as intense sources of gravity that suck in surrounding dust and gas, as well as planets and even other black holes (artist’s image)
Researchers say this black hole is surrounded by the largest and brightest disk of trapped matter ever discovered.
It is the brightest object yet found in the universe: 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun.
“Such a staggering amount of energy can only be released if the black hole eats about one sun’s worth of material every day,” says Professor Wolf.
Why this has only been noticed now, as it is the brightest thing in the universe, is because the universe is ‘full of glowing black holes’.
“The world’s telescopes produce so much data that astronomers are using advanced machine learning tools to sift through it all,” the expert said.
‘Machine learning by its nature tends to find things that are similar to what has been found before.
‘This makes machine learning excellent at finding common accretion disks around black holes – about a million have been detected so far – but not so good at finding rare outliers like J0529-4351.’
The research was published in Nature Astronomy.