An international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge found this out the oldest black hole discovered, so much so that it goes back to the beginning of the universe. According to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope, it formed 400 million years after the Big Bang, so it is more than thirteen billion years old.
It is also a cosmic colossus whose mass is million times larger than our Sun, enough to engulf the galaxy swirling around it. Current theories assumed that supermassive black holes, such as those found at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, grow as they absorb the surrounding matter, but now they have to be re-evaluated in light of this discovery.
Its size is written by the authors in the magazine Naturemeans be appeared enormously large or absorb matter five times faster pace than was thought possible. If this supermassive black hole formed as expected, it would be the result of the collapse of a star hundreds of times the size of the Sun. However, it would take a billion years for it to reach its current mass, which is impossible because the universe has just been born.
(The first photo of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has been captured)
The galaxy trying to form around this primordial black hole has been named GN-z11. It is “compact”, in the words of the authors, and hundreds of times smaller than the Milky Way. But the gluttony of the colossus in him damages his development by consumption excess gas and expel the debris in the form of high-velocity cosmic winds. These explosions disrupt star formation and slowly kill not only the galaxy, but also the black hole itself, which is in danger of collapsing. disappear due to starvation.
Until that happens, the GN-z11 could be identified using bright glow which causes energy exchange at the outer boundaries of the black hole. These astronomical objects cannot be precisely located because they do not emit or reflect light. However, they are surrounded by an accretion disk, very hot and bright, as a product of the absorption of matter and gas at its edges. This trace ultraviolet light This is what made it possible to find this new object.
When a black hole swallows a star
Those known as Tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur when supermassive black holes—those millions of times more massive than a medium-sized star—are attracted to one of these suns. The the star is torn apart by the event horizon, the outer edge that forms a brilliant accretion disk with very strong plasma eruptions. These super-hot gases are absorbed again in a flash that outshines the entire galaxy in luminosity for weeks, even months.
Thesis from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) published in Nature recreated TDE va radiation hydrodynamic simulator with parameters realistic enough to determine what will happen during a cosmic event. The test found that there is a new type of shock waves not yet known which occur when the gravitational mass of a black hole pulls a star into its interior. On contact, it emits energy at a rate not thought possible.
Thus, this finding confirms that the brightest phases of the TDE flare are amplified shock dissipation, a conclusion that will now have to be ratified through an in-depth survey by observational astronomers. And it lays the groundwork for translating observations of mass disruption events into precise measurements of the properties of a black hole like hers weight and rotation speed.
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