Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani
The Universe as we know it functions within certain limits - some of these limits are set in stone, like the speed of light, while others, just theorized, leave some room for error. Yet, finding something that's some 40 times over the theorized limit is not something that happens every day.
That's exactly what American space agency NASA announced earlier this week: the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole that is feeding so rapidly it has astronomers scratching their heads. That would be 40 times faster than what the theoretical limit assumed it's possible.
In this case the theoretical boundary is the so-called Eddington limit. Formulated by Sir Arthur Eddington, it reveals how much luminosity a celestial body can reach when the force of radiation acting outward and the gravitational force acting inward are balanced. In the case of the black hole, that's the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, and how fast matter can be absorbed.
The black hole is called LID-568 and was spotted with help from some of the most potent star observation tools at our disposal today, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. We're told it’s located at the center of a dwarf galaxy that shines its light from all the way back 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
In all fairness, the team of astronomers behind this discovery, led by astronomer Hyewon Suh, could consider themselves a bit lucky to have spotted the black hole feeding with such speed, as the phenomenon did not last very long, at least when talking on a cosmic level. Ok, maybe not lucky, but perseverant, as data about the LID-568 had already been gathered and included in the Chandra COSMOS legacy survey, which comprises 4.6 million seconds of the telescope's observations.
Once the presence of the black hole was discovered there, the team used the Webb to gather more data on it, and here we are now, wondering how such a thing could exist.
The discovery of this rapidly feeding black hole is more than one of those moments when people's jaws drop. In fact, it may be a monumental discovery for those who study black holes, as it could help us explain how supermassive black holes evolve.
More than that, LID-568 could shed a bit of light on how these massive space objects, which exist at the center of pretty much every galaxy we know of, got so big so fast. As per the team looking into this, "a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed."
To make sure the world gets wind of this discovery, but also to allow those who make a living out of watching the stars have a closer look, the astronomers published a paper on the subject in the Nature Astronomy journal. You can have a look at it here.
In this case the theoretical boundary is the so-called Eddington limit. Formulated by Sir Arthur Eddington, it reveals how much luminosity a celestial body can reach when the force of radiation acting outward and the gravitational force acting inward are balanced. In the case of the black hole, that's the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, and how fast matter can be absorbed.
The black hole is called LID-568 and was spotted with help from some of the most potent star observation tools at our disposal today, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. We're told it’s located at the center of a dwarf galaxy that shines its light from all the way back 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
In all fairness, the team of astronomers behind this discovery, led by astronomer Hyewon Suh, could consider themselves a bit lucky to have spotted the black hole feeding with such speed, as the phenomenon did not last very long, at least when talking on a cosmic level. Ok, maybe not lucky, but perseverant, as data about the LID-568 had already been gathered and included in the Chandra COSMOS legacy survey, which comprises 4.6 million seconds of the telescope's observations.
Once the presence of the black hole was discovered there, the team used the Webb to gather more data on it, and here we are now, wondering how such a thing could exist.
The discovery of this rapidly feeding black hole is more than one of those moments when people's jaws drop. In fact, it may be a monumental discovery for those who study black holes, as it could help us explain how supermassive black holes evolve.
More than that, LID-568 could shed a bit of light on how these massive space objects, which exist at the center of pretty much every galaxy we know of, got so big so fast. As per the team looking into this, "a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed."
To make sure the world gets wind of this discovery, but also to allow those who make a living out of watching the stars have a closer look, the astronomers published a paper on the subject in the Nature Astronomy journal. You can have a look at it here.
Google News