Black hole has the fastest absorption rate ever discovered, can “eat” the entire Earth in just one second

It has long been rumored that in our Milky Way galaxy there are more than 100 million black holes, but they do not emit light, so even with astronomical telescopes, it is difficult for us to find them.

However, for some black holes, due to the surrounding objects and cosmic matter, accretion disks are formed around them. Now, the black hole can be seen by scientists, for example the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 and the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, both of which are two black holes with accretion disks. – the orange part is visible, while the black hole itself is still an invisible space.

On June 16, Xinhua news agency retweeted the news that an international research team formed by the Australian National University had by chance discovered the fastest-growing black hole in the past 9 billion years. It (the black hole designated J114447.77) was discovered with the help of the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia as part of the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey.

J114447.77, is about 7 billion light-years from Earth, which means that the light emitted by its accretion disk takes about 7 billion years for us to observe. At the present time, the mass of this black hole is 3 billion times the mass of the Sun, and its size when compared to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is more than 500 times larger, so it is identified as a supermassive black hole.

Through the process of observing and analyzing this black hole, the research team found that it is crazily devouring matter, on average it can “swallow” matter equivalent to one Earth mass per second and has could eat up the equivalent of 11 Jupiters in an hour. Or more broadly, this black hole can absorb 86,400 Earths, equivalent to 271 Jupiters per day, every 4 days it can eat matter equivalent to one Sun, it can also be said that it is a “hole” fastest black hole” and can be called “the most voracious of all black holes discovered”.

And for that same reason, this black hole grows at a very fast rate, but the mass we measure (3 billion times that of the Sun) is not its current mass. Instead, this is the mass from 7 billion years ago, because what we are seeing now is really just information from 7 billion years ago.

Scientists have deduced that in its early days, its swallowing speed was not so fast and its mass was not so large. It is speculated that “it could be because two large galaxies collided, then forced a large amount of matter into the black hole” and turned it into a “glutton giant”.

The abundant matter around it also promotes the appearance of a very bright accretion disk outside its Schwarzschild radius, so this black hole is indeed a very bright quasar. Because in the accretion disk outside the black hole, a large amount of matter orbiting will gradually fall into the black hole.

As these materials are crushed, they also collide and rub against each other, causing the accretion disk to release enormous energy like a superparticle accelerator, so it also emits distinctive light. Observations show it to be 7,000 times brighter than the overall luminosity of the Milky Way, which is home to hundreds of billions of active stars. The researchers called it “the brightest quasar in 9 billion years”.