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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.
Whenever I see news like that, it reminds me that we're not really "seeing" anything. We just get tons of astronomic data, basically piles of photons and neutrinos and muons and god knows what, with different frequencies and spins and all that. Then we take that data, and start working towards mapping it all onto our continuously evolving and obviously imperfect theory what all that actually means. So astronomers in the end decide what the data means, and then you have these sensationalist articles in the media about "the things we see". Over time, theories will change, data will prove to be imperfect or contain some margin of error previously unaccounted for, etc, etc. So articles like this are quite meaningless. There is real data with real impact on the theory, but it's also very likely that data like that will over the long term change the theory and our understanding of the universe, with the sensationalist concepts of "giant black hole eating up whole galaxy" simply dying the way of the dodo. Good job astronomers for expanding the human knowledge! But let's take the sensationalist sentences with a grain of doubt.....
it would have taken light 12 billion years to get from there to here.
If you're going to be pedantic, you should take into account the expansion of the universe.