Black holes still provide some of the biggest, and superlative, mysteries out there.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The fastest growing black hole known to humans is staggeringly large and apparently very hungry, according to new research by an international team of astronomers.
“The mass of the black hole is also approximately 8,000 times larger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way,” Christopher Onken of the National University of Australia said in a statement.
To locate it further, the yawning gap, known as J2157, is 34 billion times the mass of our sun and consumes the equivalent of one sun each day.
“If the Milky Way’s black hole wanted to get fat, it would have to swallow two-thirds of all the stars in our galaxy,” adds Onken.
Onken and his team discovered the black hole in 2018 and were amazed at its rapid growth rate.
“The amount of black holes they can swallow depends on how much mass they already have,” explained team member Fuyan Bian of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “So for this one to be devouring matter at such a high rate, we thought it could become a new record holder. And now we know.”
The team used ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to obtain accurate data on the mass of the black hole. Their results appear in Monthly Notices from the Royal Astronomical Society.
Fortunately for us, the giant of a black hole is billions of light years away, which also means that researchers are seeing it when the universe was very young. How a black hole could grow so large at such an early period in the history of the universe is one of the most intriguing mysteries the team plans to pursue.
“Is this galaxy one of the giants of the early universe,” asks Onken, “or did the black hole swallow an extraordinary amount from its surroundings? We will have to keep digging to find out.”
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