Astronomers have discovered a black hole that is the brightest and fastest growing in the last 9 billion years, is 3 billion times the mass of the sun, and swallows a part of the matter the size of the Earth every second.

500 times larger than Sagittarius A

The report published in "Live Science" states that the new supermassive black hole - known as "J1144" - is about 500 times the size of "Sagittarius A", which is the large black hole located at the heart of the Milky Way, Recently photographed for the first time, it appears as a ring of super-hot plasma around the Great Void that emits 7,000 times more light than our entire galaxy.

Australian astronomers discovered this giant cosmic force using data from the "Skymapper .. Southern Space Survey" of the Australian National University, which aims to map the entire sky in the southern hemisphere, the researchers said - in a press release published on the university's website on June 15. This June - Locating a black hole was like finding "a very large and unexpected needle in a haystack".

Christopher Onken (left) and Samuel Lay of the new hole discovery team (Jimmy Kidston-ANU)

"Astronomers have been looking for things like this for more than 50 years, and they've found thousands of faint black holes, but this amazingly bright black hole has disappeared without a trace," lead researcher Christopher Onken (an astronomer at the Australian National University in Canberra) said in the press release. for someone to notice.”

According to the statement, the voracious appetite of the new black hole makes those of massive black holes small;

Usually, the growth rates of these large cosmic entities slow down when they become massive, and this is likely due to the increase in Hawking radiation;

It is the thermal radiation that is supposed to be emitted from black holes due to the effects of quantum mechanics.

It devoured an Earth-sized substance every second

A newly discovered black hole is eating up so much matter that its event horizon (the boundary from which nothing - including light - can escape) is unusually wide, says co-author Samuel Lay (an astronomer at the Australian National University). In the statement, "the orbits of the planets in our solar system will all fit into its event horizon."

This amazingly bright hole was hidden unnoticed (Shutterstock)

Normally, black holes can't be seen because they don't give off any light, but astronomers can detect black holes because their intense gravity pulls matter toward the event horizon so quickly that it turns into super-hot plasma;

This gives off light in a ring around the black hole, called the accretion disk.

And the newly discovered giant accretion disk is the brightest disk ever discovered by astronomers, due to the large “event horizon” and the maximum speed with which matter is pulled, and researchers are “fairly confident” that that speed is a record that will not be broken, according to the statement.

Even an amateur can see it

The researchers said the black hole's boundary is so bright that even amateurs can see it with a sufficiently powerful telescope aimed at the right part of the southern horizon of the sky.

The team is now trying to determine why the massive black hole remains thirsty for matter (NASA)

The team is now trying to determine why the huge black hole remains thirsty for matter, as scientists suspect that a catastrophic cosmic event must be responsible for the birth of this great void. black for feeding.

It may be difficult to know exactly how the black hole formed, and researchers doubt that they will find another black hole of similar mass and speed of expansion again, which makes it difficult to test a general theory about the formation of such voracious cosmic bodies.

It's hard to find one like him

"This black hole is an anomaly, and while there is nothing impossible, we don't think we will ever find a similar one," co-author Christian Wolf (an Australian National University astronomer and leader of the Skymapper group) said in the statement. Things like this."

The new black hole is the brightest and fastest growing in the last 9 billion years (Shutterstock)

However, some researchers speculate that there are as many as 40 quintillion (1 to the 18th) black hole in the universe, which could account for about 1% of all matter in the universe, so the odds of a more ferocious black hole somewhere in the universe are not non-existent.

The study was submitted on June 8 to the preprint database (Arcaive), but has not yet been reviewed by peer researchers, and if accepted, it will be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia).