“The fact that this is such an outlier that’s so much brighter than the other black holes at that age of the universe means that maybe it’s something like the collision of two big galaxies, which is suddenly able to feed the black hole and let it grow that rapidly. The cause of J1144’s fast growth is still not clear, says Onken. But, comparing the newly discovered object with others found over the past 60 years, the team found none with comparable growth in the last 9 billion years. The light from the new black hole, SMSS J114447.77-430859.3 (J1144 for short), took 7 billion years to reach Earth.Įarly in the universe’s history, fast black-hole growth rates are not unusual. The observations we make in the universe come in the form of light, which takes time to travel across the vast expanse of space. More on astronomy: Why is the James Webb Space Telescope such a big deal? This black hole is eating the equivalent of 80 of our Suns every year, or an Earth every second.” The gas then gets very hot, and shines across, in this case, more than half the universe. “As more stuff is falling into the black hole, that material – like a ball rolling down the hill – increases speed and there’s a lot of friction within the gas falling into the black hole.
Lead author Chris Onken, an astrophysicist at ANU, explains that we can tell how fast a black hole is growing by measuring its brightness, or luminosity. The discovery was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Led by researchers at the Australian National University (ANU), an international team has found the fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years. Some are larger than others and, while they all absorb the matter around them, some grow faster. These super-compressed objects are millions or billions of times larger than our own Sun, with gravitational pulls so great that not even light can escape.īut not all black holes are created equal. ANU researchers witness birth of tight binary star system for the first timeīlack holes are the densest, most mysterious objects in the universe.Here comes James Webb Space Telescope’s first full-colour photo drop.Cosmic “heartbeat” detected in fast radio burst billions of lightyears from Earth.Machine learning identifies the origin of the most famous Martian meteorite to land on Earth.New telescopes at Siding Spring to detect gravitational waves.
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