A black hole 10 billion light years away suddenly lights up, becoming one of the brightest objects ever detected in outer space. Photo/ESO
WASHINGTON – A black hole 10 billion light years away it suddenly lit up, becoming one of the brightest objects ever detected in outer space. Despite its great distance, the black hole is so bright that astronomers initially thought it was explosion stars less than 1 billion light years away.
The black hole, which has been dubbed J221951, is estimated to be about 10 billion light years from Earth. Meaning the cosmic monster turned on its light when the universe was about a quarter of its current age.
“Black hole J221951 is one of the most extreme examples of a shocking black hole. Our understanding of what supermassive black holes can do has grown tremendously in recent years,” said Matt Nicholl, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast, quoted by SINDOnews from the Live Science page, Friday (7/7/2023).
The astronomers’ findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and are available as a preprint on arXiv. The discovery was made when researchers tracked the paths of gravitational waves, the fast-moving ripples in space-time generated by the most massive cosmic collisions.
The team hypothesized that the waves were released during the collision of two densely packed dead stars known as neutron stars, which are known to erupt in bright explosions called kilonova explosions. Ripples in space-time do point toward bright objects.
However, unlike the kilonova, which first appears blue before dimming to red over several days. This point in the sky remains bright and blue for months, even longer than a star’s explosion.
Follow-up observations with several telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, revealed that the mysterious object is lined up with the center of a dim and distant galaxy. This suggests it could be a supermassive black hole, very similar to the one at the center of the Milky Way.
2023-07-07 14:59:59
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