Supermassive Black Hole Spotted Gas Sucker at a Third of the Speed ​​of Light

A team of astronomers has been able to observe a supermassive black hole sucking gas with a speed so remarkable that the only appropriate comparison is the speed of light. The gas was sucked into the supermassive black hole at 30% of the speed limit of the universe.

"We were able to track a group of material the size of the Earth for about a day because it was pulled toward the black hole, accelerating up to one-third the speed of light before being swallowed by the hole "says Ken Pounds. Professor at the University of Leicester, in a press release.

The black hole is far away from the Earth, about a billion light-years away in a galaxy with the catchy name of PG211 + 143, to be exact. Pounds and his team were able to use the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory to detect the black hole.

Launched in 1999, the XMM contains three high-speed X-ray telescopes and the first optical monitor used in an X-ray observatory. The Earth's atmosphere blocks all X-rays in the space, which means that to detect something like the environment of a black hole of 40 million solar masses (the standard unit of measurement in astronomy), you have to launch your telescope in the space.

"The galaxy we observed with XMM-Newton has a black hole of 40 million solar masses that is very bright and obviously well-fed," says Pounds. "Indeed, a couple of decades ago, we detected a strong wind indicating that the hole was overfed, and while such winds are present in many active galaxies, the PG1211 + 143 has given another the hole itself. "

Black holes are so powerful that matter of all kinds gets stuck in a traffic jam trying to get in. This accumulation of material at the edge of black holes is known as accretion discs. Turning around the black hole in a spiral of death, they can be misaligned with rings of gas breaking and bumping into each other. Known as "chaotic accretion", the new discovery shows that it could be common among supermassive black holes.

Even in the center of a distant galaxy, chaos reigns.

There are really no phenomena comparable to black holes, their ability to consume and destroy are incomparable in the known universe. The known black hole with the highest growth, for example, could destroy the sun in two days.

Source: Astronomy Now