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Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days.
The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years.
"This black hole 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," said Dr Wolf from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"If we had this monster sitting at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky."
[...] The discovery of the new supermassive black hole was confirmed using the spectrograph on the ANU 2.3 metre telescope to split colours into spectral lines.
"We don't know how this one grew so large, so quickly in the early days of the Universe," Dr Wolf said.
Christian Wolf, Fuyan Bian, Christopher A. Onken, Brian P. Schmidt, Patrick Tisserand, Noura Alonzi, Wei Jeat Hon, John L. Tonry. Discovery of the most ultra-luminous QSO using Gaia, SkyMapper and WISE. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2018
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Sunday May 20 2018, @01:56PM (3 children)
*Shrug* or perhaps the life on Earth would simply be more resistant to ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, adapted to local conditions. That actually seems more likely that Dr. Wolf's explanation, which really only applies to life exactly as we know it, and only some of that.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @07:37PM (2 children)
abundant X rays means you can give up on stable chemistry for small scale things.
life as we know it works because chemistry for small scale things is stable.
I've never thought of myself as indoctrinated, but I also agree that life in the presence of intense ionizing (and worse) radiation is unlikely.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday May 20 2018, @09:37PM (1 child)
Meh! Chemistry bigot!
What about the Horta? [startrek.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @09:53PM
"silicon-based" aka chemistry-based