Astronomers have witnessed distant, super-large black holes eating away at the surrounding material so quickly that they “burn” excess mass at almost a third of the speed of light.
The discovery comes when researchers studied the ultra-large black hole-mounted active galactic nucleus (AGN) of the Seifert galaxy, about 1.2 billion light-years away. The black hole, designated as PG1211+143, has a mass of about 40 million times the Sun’s mass and is equipped with a bright quasar. This has made it a major target for astronomers looking to understand how super-large black holes grow due to the importance of feeding or “addition.”
The team examined black holes using the European Space Agency (ESA) X-ray spacecraft XMM-Newton, finding an influx of material equivalent to the mass of 10 Earths that flow into the object over just five weeks.
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The problem of falling around the black hole settles into a flat cloud of gas and dust called an attached disk, from which material is fed into the central black hole.
However, even this huge black hole cannot do much of a thing, leading to serious indigestion in the form of runoff that travels about 0.27 times the speed of light.
That’s about 181 million miles per hour, or 100,000 times the top speed of a Lockheed Martin F-16 Jetfighter.
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These spills followed a few days of delay inflow of black holes material, resulting in temperatures of millions of degrees of heating material around the AGN. This created a radiation pressure that allowed excess material to move away from the central region of PG1211+143.
Because stars form in galaxies from a cold, dense gas excess, these high-speed outflows can starve the space around PG1211+143 around the new star building blocks by pushing away both the gas and dust and its materials.
In other words, studying these high-speed outflows from this black hole could help scientists discover how black hole eruptions transform galaxies from the hub of the birth of stars into more stationary beings.
“Establishing a direct causal relationship between large, temporary inflows and the resulting outflows provides an attractive prospect of seeing super-large black holes grow with regular monitoring of hot relativistic winds associated with the addition of new material.”
The team’s investigation was published in the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) monthly notification magazine on June 10th.
This article was originally published on Space.com.
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