Time-travelling black hole is ‘most hellish place’ in the universe

Cosmic lightning anyone?

The most ‘hellish place’ in the universe has been revealed – and no, it’s not the toilets on day five of Glasto.  

Scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) say it is a massive black hole that mercilessly engulfs the equivalent of a star a day as it sucks in anything and everything around it.

Sitting around 12 billion light years away, the black hole has a mass that’s roughly 17 billion times that of the Sun, and a diameter that spans seven light years. 

One light year is six trillion miles, so that’s pretty big.

‘The incredible rate of growth also means a huge release of light and heat,’ said lead author Christian Wolf, an associate professor at ANU. 

‘So, this is also the most luminous known object in the universe. It’s 500 trillion times brighter than our sun.’

The light is emitted from an accretion disc, a sort of cosmic dinner plate that the material dragged into. As it collides with more celestial objects, it creates more light and heat.

This makes the black hole, catchily named J0529-4351, the fastest, brightest and most hellish, black hole ever found – and it was hiding in plain sight. 

Co-author Dr Christopher Onken said: ‘It’s a surprise it remained undetected until now, given what we know about many other, less impressive black holes.’

J0529-4351 was first detected by a 2.3-metre telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in New South Wales, where the researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope – one of the largest telescopes in the world – to confirm the full nature of the black hole and measure its mass.  

‘The disc is hot, from thousands of degrees Fahrenheit on the outside to many 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the edge of the eye of the storm,’ said Associate Professor Wolf, speaking to Newsweek.

‘The whole storm is threaded with strong magnetic fields and there are lightning bolts of cosmic size discharging everywhere.

‘We have now found the possibly most hellish place in the Universe.’

Black holes: fun facts

• The closest black hole is around 1,500 light years away and is called Gaia BH1

• Black holes spin, with the fastest known as GRS 1915+105 which clocks in at over 1,000 rotations per second.

• The lightest-known black hole is around 3.8 times the Sun’s mass.

• The first time a real image of a black hole was shown in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope shared an image of M87

• If the Sun was replaced with a black hole of the same mass, everything would be colder but the planets would stay in the same orbit.

Black holes also offer us a window into our past. Astronomers are seeing J0529-4351 in the state it would have been 12 billion years ago, which means it formed just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. 

‘The light from this black hole has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us,’ said Professor Rachel Webster, from the University of Melbourne.  

‘In the adolescent universe, the matter was moving chaotically and feeding hungry black holes. Today, stars are moving orderly at safe distances and only rarely plunge into black holes.’ 

So we’re safe, for now. 

The researchers’ findings are published in Nature Astronomy.