Scientists Find ‘Fastest-Growing’ Supermassive Black Hole Known in Universe
A supermassive black hole in the center of the ultra-luminous quasar SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 (J2157-3602 for short) devours a mass equivalent to our Sun every two days and has a total mass of roughly about 20 billion solar masses, according to new research.
This image from the VISTA Hemispheric Survey shows the ultra-luminous quasar SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 (center). Image credit: Wolf et al.
The newly-discovered black hole, which is located approximately 12.5 billion light-years from Earth, is growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that cause lots of friction and heat.
“If we had this monster sitting at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon,” said lead author Dr. Christian Wolf, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO).
“It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky.”
“The energy emitted from this supermassive black hole was mostly UV light, but also radiated X-rays.”
“Again, if this monster was at the center of the Milky Way it would likely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of X-rays emanating from it.”
The J2157-3602 black hole was found by combining data from the recent Gaia data release 2 with data from the SkyMapper telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory and NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
“Large and rapidly-growing black holes are exceedingly rare, and we have been searching for them with SkyMapper for several months now,” Dr. Wolf said.
“ESA’s Gaia satellite, which measures tiny motions of celestial objects, helped us find this supermassive black hole.”
“As fast-growing supermassive black holes shine, they can be used as beacons to see and study the formation of elements in the early galaxies of the Universe,” he added.
“Scientists can see the shadows of objects in front of the supermassive black hole.”
“These kinds of black holes also help to clear the fog around them by ionizing gases, which makes the Universe more transparent. Instruments on very large ground-based telescopes being built over the next decade would be able to directly measure the expansion of the Universe using these very bright black holes.”
The results appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (arXiv.org preprint).
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Christian Wolf et al. 2018. Discovery of the most ultra-luminous QSO using Gaia, SkyMapper and WISE. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, in press; arXiv: 1805.04317