Astronomers have found a black hole that absorbs one star every two days

Scientists believe that this is the fastest growing black hole in our universe.

An example of a bright supermassive black hole. Image of NASA.

 

Astronomers from the Australian Astronomical Society have discovered asupermassive black hole J2157-3602, which every two days absorbs a single star the size of the Sun. It is 12 billion light-years from the Earth, so scientists observe the phenomenon with a significant delay in time (the information that has come down to us shows that it was 12 billion years ago).

The researchers believe that this is the fastest growing black hole that was ever found in the observed universe. It was discovered with the help of three different instruments: the satellite of Gaia of the European Space Agency, observations in the observatory and NASA satellite. The full text of the study is only planned to be published, but the preliminary record has already appeared on the arXiv website.

According to observations of scientists, the size of J2157-3602 is about 20 billion suns and it increases by 1% every million years. This means that approximately every two days a black hole absorbs a mass of matter equivalent to the Sun.

The speed of the hole growth simultaneously makes it the brightest object of this kind: it glows brighter than the whole galaxy.

If such a monster were located in the center of the Milky Way, then in the sky it would be 10 times brighter than the full Moon. It would seem an incredibly bright star that would eclipse all the other stars.

from the statement of the Australian Astronomical Society

Scientists noted that if J2157-3602 were in Milky Way, this would make life on Earth impossible because of the huge flux of X-rays emanating from the black hole.