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Astronomers Discovered the Fastest-Growing Black Hole Ever Seen (wral.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Yhcrana shares "some good old fashioned astronomy news." Astronomers have discovered "a black hole 20 billion times the mass of the sun eating the equivalent of a star every two days," reports the New York Times.
The black hole is growing so rapidly, said Christian Wolf, of the Australian National University, who led the team that found it in the depths of time, "that it is probably 10,000 times brighter than the galaxy it lives in." So bright, that it is dazzling our view and we can't see the galaxy itself. He and his colleagues announced the discovery in a paper to be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia...
The blaze from material swirling around this newly observed drainpipe into eternity -- known officially as SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 -- is as luminous as 700 trillion suns, according to Wolf and his collaborators. If it were at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it would be 10 times brighter than the moon and bathe the Earth in so many X-rays that life would be impossible. Luckily it's not anywhere nearby. It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us, so we are glimpsing this cataclysm as it appeared at the dawn of time, only 2 billion years after the Big Bang, when stars and galaxies were furiously forming.
The blaze from material swirling around this newly observed drainpipe into eternity -- known officially as SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 -- is as luminous as 700 trillion suns, according to Wolf and his collaborators. If it were at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it would be 10 times brighter than the moon and bathe the Earth in so many X-rays that life would be impossible. Luckily it's not anywhere nearby. It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us, so we are glimpsing this cataclysm as it appeared at the dawn of time, only 2 billion years after the Big Bang, when stars and galaxies were furiously forming.
I assume you know that the black hole itself isn't emitting light, but its accretion disk is. There is a bunch of mass that "falls" into the black hole. This mass doesnt approach it head on, it is traveling by. As the black hole pulls the mass, it speeds up and builds angular momentum. This causes is to form a decaying orbit around the black hole. As it falls, it causes friction with all the rest of the mass falling in at the same time. This generates enormous amounts of heat that glows in various bands of radiation. The most luminous generate X-rays, Gamma-rays, light, infrared rays, microwaves, and lower-frequency radio waves.
This object has a massive accretion disk, that is super-luminous.
Americans believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that climate-change is a global conspiracy to tax them more, that evolution is "just a theory" and that vaccines cause autism.
And you want to talk to them about cosmology and black holes ?
Why do scientists even waste their time anymore is this rationality-sucking black hole that is the U.S. ? Why don't they move out of the country to a place where their intelligence and knowledge will actually be desired and valued, and let americans rot in their miserable supersticious barbarian shithole once and for all ?