Europe 1 with AFP 12:48 p.m., February 21, 2024
According to a study published in the famous Nature magazine, astronomers have identified a supermassive black hole which absorbs the equivalent of a Sun per day, at the heart of the most luminous quasar ever observed.
Astronomers have identified a supermassive black hole that absorbs the equivalent of a Sun per day, at the heart of the most luminous quasar ever observed, according to a study published in Nature. "We have discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and 'eats' just over one sun per day," explained Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and lead author of the study, in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
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Space: a supermassive black hole devours a star before the eyes of scientists
The black hole attracts a colossal amount of matter
Invisible by definition, a supermassive black hole illuminates the core of the galaxy that shelters it through its activity. This nucleus is called a quasar, and the one observed by the ESO's Very Large Telescope (the VLT, located in Chile) is "the most luminous object in the known universe", according to Christian Wolf. Its light took 12 billion years to reach the VLT instruments, which makes it possible to date its existence to the primitive epoch of the Universe - 13.8 billion years old.
The light from J0529-4351, as it was named, had been detected in the 1980s, recalls the study published Monday. But an automatic analysis of data from the Gaia satellite, which maps the galaxy, had likened it to a very luminous star. Researchers using the Siding Spring Observatory, in Australia, and then the VLT's X-shooter instrument, identified it last year as indeed being a quasar. The supermassive black hole it houses attracts a colossal amount of matter, accelerated at speeds that are no less so, emitting light equivalent to that of more than 500 billion suns, according to the ESO press release.