Discovery of the Most Luminous Quasar of the Last 9 Gyr
upstart writes:
Now, an international team of researchers say they have discovered a supermassive black hole that gobbles up the equivalent of one Earth every second.
By looking at other luminous objects that are billions of years old, the team confirmed the newly discovered behemoth was the brightest and fastest-growing supermassive black hole of the past 9 billion years (that we know of).
Located in the bright constellation of Centaurus, this luminous cosmic beast is more than 500 times larger than the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.
[...] The team stumbled across the unusual object while they were hunting for close pairs of binary stars - the stars that orbit around the same centre of mass-in the Milky Way.
[...] Supermassive black holes - which have a mass of millions or billions of Suns - are the engines that drive some of the brightest objects in the sky: quasars.
From Earth, these luminous objects look a bit like stars, but their light actually comes from the ring of gas, dust and stars swirling around the black hole, known as an accretion disk.
As this material gets sucked into the gaping mouth of the black hole by its intense gravitational pull, it gets super hot and emits bright light.
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