Jakarta –
Black holes are still an interesting topic of study for scientists. Its enormous gravitational pull is known to be able to devour stars, planets and even other black holes. So, is it true that the power of a black hole can devour the entire universe?
Quoted from the Australian National University (ANU) website, recently researchers at ANU managed to discover the fastest growing black hole ever recorded, which can devour the equivalent of one Sun every day.
“The extraordinary growth rate also means the release of large amounts of light and heat,” said lead author Associate Professor Christian Wolf, quoted from the official ANU website.
“So, this is also the brightest known object in the universe. It is 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun,” he added.
Co-author Dr Christopher Onken added that such black holes have not been detected until now.
“Given what we know about many other black holes that are less impressive. They hide in plain sight. Black holes have a mass of about 17 billion times the mass of the Sun in our solar system,” he said.
Monster Black Hole Discovery
This black hole was first detected using a 2.3 meter telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in NSW.
The research team then turned to one of the largest telescopes in the world, namely the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, to determine the nature of the black hole as a whole and measure its mass.
Prof. Rachel Webster from Melbourne University, said that this newly discovered black hole would take 12 billion light years to get to the point of detection that researchers can reach on Earth.
“In the juvenile universe, matter moved chaotically and fed hungry black holes. Today, stars move orderly at a safe distance and rarely plunge into black holes,” he said.
The intense radiation comes from the accretion disk around the black hole, which is a holding pattern for all the matter waiting to be devoured.
“It looks like a giant, magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere, and winds so strong that they can circle the Earth in seconds,” explained Associate Professor Wolf.
“This storm cell is seven light years across, 50 percent farther than the distance from our solar system to the next star in the Galaxy, alpha Centauri,” he added.
NASA Information About Black Holes
Even though monster black holes have been discovered, NASA explains that black holes cannot consume the universe or entire galaxies.
Quoted from Live Sciencea black hole physicist at the University of Rhode Island, Gaurav Khanna stated, “The existence of this issue is based solely on the concept that black holes work like a vacuum, sucking space towards themselves.”
Black holes only swallow objects that are very close and fall within their event horizon. If a black hole were to devour the entire universe, a major change in the direction of the cosmos would be required.
“For example, the event horizon of a solar-mass black hole would only extend 2 miles (3 kilometers). For an Earth-mass black hole, the event horizon would only be a few inches, like “the size of your thumb,” Khanna said.
So, the black hole’s gravity still impacts the stars and planets around it. It might even cause them to orbit, as happened with the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, but the black hole didn’t swallow them.
Watch the Video “The Biggest Black Hole Found, Bigger than the Sun”
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2024-03-01 13:30:00
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