Astronomers at Australian National University have just discovered an enormous black hole that shines. They looked at the quasar named SMSS~J215728.21-360215.1, and in its center, they saw a supermassive black hole that shines brightly. The black hole is about 20 billion times bigger than the Sun and growing at an unbelievable speed – 1% with each passing million years.
If this bright black hole would have been in our galaxy, astronomers say that it would outshine all the stars in the sky. However, it would also make our planet sterile because of the x-rays the quasar emanates.
Christian Wolf, the author of the study, says:
“This black hole is growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that cause lots of friction and heat.”
It Would Be Ten Times Brighter Than Our Moon
He adds that “if we had this monster sitting at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky.”
However, the supermassive black hole is at a distance of 12 billion light-years, meaning that what the astronomers saw happened 12 billion years ago. That would be right after the Big Bang.
What’s making astronomers so curious is that the black hole they saw was in the early days of the universe and they’re wondering how it grew so large.
Wolf explains how they found the bright black hole. They used data from the Gaia satellite, Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the SkyMapper telescope:
“These large and rapidly-growing blackholes are exceedingly rare, and we have been searching for them with SkyMapper for several months now.”
What’s their next objective?
“The hunt is on to find even faster-growing black holes,” said Wolf.
Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.