Moalims

The most hellish place in the universe that is swallowing the sun every day

Scientists have not yet been able to describe what Hell will be like and perhaps that is because no one has ever come back to tell the tale. The concept of hell is a place that would be extremely uncomfortable, hot and dangerous for human life.

Scientists have not yet been able to describe what Hell will be like and perhaps that is because no one has ever come back to tell the tale. The concept of hell is a place that would be extremely uncomfortable, hot and dangerous for human life.

But now, thanks to a massive astronomical study, we've managed to discover what is possibly the most hellish place in the universe.

A new article published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy describes the existence of a black hole surrounded by the largest and brightest disk of gas and dust ever discovered.

It is named J0529-4351 and was actually recorded in the data many years ago, but its majesty has only now been recognized.

Very large black holes

Astronomers have already discovered about a million rapidly expanding supermassive black holes throughout the universe, found at the centers of galaxies and as large as millions or billions of suns.

To accelerate, they pull stars and clouds of gas out of their stable orbits into a rotating ring of material called an accretion disk.

Once they get there, very little material survives. The disk contains material that will soon be swallowed by the black hole.

The material in the disc rubs against each other, causing the disc to heat up.

If enough material accumulates, its heat flare becomes so intense that it leaves thousands of galaxies behind, and for those of us on Earth, watching the black hole swallow from more than 12 billion light-years away. Makes it possible.

The fastest rising black hole in the universe

The accretion disk of J0529-4351 emits light 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun. Such a staggering amount of energy could only be released if the black hole swallowed the same amount as the Sun every day.

So it must already have a large mass. Our data show that J0529-4351 is 15 to 20 billion times more massive than our Sun.

But there is no reason to fear these black holes. It took more than 12 billion years for this light to reach us, which means that its propagation must have stopped long ago.

In the nearby universe, we see that today's supermassive black holes are mostly like sleeping giants.

Black holes lose control

The era of black holes swallowing everything is over because the gas floating in galaxies has turned into most stars.

And over billions of years the stars have arranged themselves into patterns: they are mostly in long, orderly orbits around the black holes that sleep at the centers of their galaxies.

But even if a star suddenly moves toward a black hole, it will immediately break up and quickly escape in another direction.

 Space probes use slingshot-like tactics to reach hard-to-reach parts of the solar system by getting energy from Jupiter.

But if space was more populated and our probe encountered one coming in the opposite direction, the two would collide and explode into a cloud of debris that would quickly fall into Jupiter's atmosphere.

Such collisions between stars due to current perturbations were common in the early universe and black holes were the first to take advantage of it.

The accretion disk: a forbidden zone for astronauts

Accretion disks are corridors in space from which nothing returns, but they are also fiercely hostile to life. They are like giant storm cells, whose clouds glow at temperatures reaching several tens of thousands of degrees Celsius.

As we approach the hole, the clouds move faster, and speeds can reach 100,000 km/s. They move as far in one second as the earth moves in one hour.

The disk around J0529-4351 spans seven light-years. This would be about one and a half times the distance between the Sun and its nearest neighbor Alpha Centauri.

But why did you find out now?

If it is the brightest object in the universe, why has it not been detected until now? In short, this is because the universe is full of glowing black holes.

The world's telescopes generate so much information that astronomers have to use sophisticated machine learning tools to filter it. But machine learning only looks for similar things that it already finds.

This makes these tools great for finding run-of-the-mill accretion disks around black holes (about a million have been detected so far), but much better for detecting outliers like J0529-4351. do not have.

In 2015, a Chinese team almost missed a fast-accelerating black hole because it was picked out by an algorithm because it seemed too real.

Our work was aimed at finding the most important, most luminous and fastest growing black holes, so we avoided using machine learning tools because they guided us forward based on prior knowledge.

Instead we used more old-fashioned methods to find the new data and got the best results