In June 2022, Australian scientists discovered a quasar that emits unusually bright light.
The stunning view was generated by the supermassive black hole J1144 with a mass of over three
billion suns.
The image shows it as a bright blue spot.
It's not the first time astronomers have encountered such giants, but this one is special.
In the known universe, there are no black holes equal to J1144 in appetite.
Every second it absorbs a mass equivalent to the mass of the Earth!
It eats up so much matter that its event horizon is unusually wide - the orbits of all the
planets in the solar system could fit inside of it!
Scientists have concluded it’s the fastest growing black hole to have existed in the
last 9 billion years.
A huge red-hot accretion disk formed around J1144 shines 7,000 times brighter than the
light of the entire Milky Way.
It's so bright, even amateur astronomers can see it with a powerful enough telescope.
How dangerous is the black hole and many thousands other black holes that may lie much closer
to us?
How many of them surround our solar system or even sit right there?
And are all black holes the same?
[LOGO]
Not all stars in the universe have a permanent home and a solar system.
Some of them are wandering through space.
And what if one of such stars, about 20 times as massive as our Sun, explodes?
It will become a black hole, but not a typical one.
There’s a category of black holes which aren’t stationary.
They are ejected from their locations by extreme cosmic explosions or other large-scale space
phenomena.
In space, nothing is really stationary, even our solar system moves around the center of
the Milky Way galaxy at more than 788,000 kilometers per hour [490,000 miles per hour].
But some rogue black holes have been seen moving at 5 million kilometers per hour [3
million miles per hour]!
Astronomers believe there are at least 100 million of these wandering black holes right
here in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The closest rogue black hole to us was recently discovered by scientists and is currently
located at a distance of about 5,000 light years away.
It sits in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way.
Usually, black holes are accompanied by stars, but this one isn’t.
The Hubble Space Telescope has also managed to directly measure the black hole’s mass,
which is about seven times the solar mass.
The giant is moving at around 160,000 kilometers per hour [100,000 miles per hour].
When a massive star explodes in a supernova which isn’t perfectly symmetrical, this
can give the newly formed black hole a “kick”, and send it roaming through space away from
its surrounding stars.
5,000 light years is still a huge distance.
Just recently scientists have discovered a black hole candidate with ten times the solar
mass.
And it’s now thought to be the closest one to Earth - just about 1,500 light years away.
Called Gaia BH1, the black hole has a star companion similar in mass and age to the Sun.
But there’s more!
This star could host planets.
Still, astronomers believe that the nearest wandering black hole should be about 80 light
years from our planet.
Alright, but what if there’s a black hole hiding in the solar system?
No, we won’t be sucked up, black holes aren’t giant vacuum cleaners.
It’s a myth.
If the Sun was suddenly replaced with a black hole of the same mass, our planet's orbit
around it wouldn't change.
But according to simulations, the Earth’s atmosphere would be incinerated in seconds
by the heat of the monster's accretion disk, the oceans would evaporate, and molten metal
would rush from the Earth's mantle into space.
Then the black hole would tear our planet to pieces.
But to be "sucked" into a monster, we'd have to cross its Schwarzschild radius or the radius
of the event horizon surrounding a non-rotating black hole.
There are also theoretical primordial black holes.
Usually, black holes come in huge sizes, but this class is really tiny.
Immediately after the Big Bang there were small fluctuations in density throughout the
Universe.
Some regions had slightly more or less mass than the average.
And material at regions with the mass above the norm could have collapsed to create miniature
black holes.
Such black holes would have been around for a very long time, and they could be more massive
than a star or lighter than an eyelash.
Although observations show that, as a rule, there are two possible mass ranges or ‘windows’
for primordial black holes.
These are less than one lunar mass [74 million metric tons] and a few tens of solar masses.
Primordial black holes aren’t threatening us.
In fact, if they exist, they could account for some or all of the dark matter that helps
keep the universe together.
A PhD student from the University of Geneva has been working on the formation of primordial
black holes after the Big Bang.
The result is there could be hundreds of times more of these black holes in the universe.
And given they are less massive than the Moon, all the dark matter could be explained by
their existence.
But that low of a mass for a black hole would mean it's less than one-tenth of a millimeter
in diameter or about the width of a human hair.
It would also mean that primordial black holes should be everywhere, including our solar
system.
A theoretical astrophysicist from Harvard University thinks there’s one hiding on
the edge of the solar system affecting orbits of a variety of small objects beyond Pluto.
But then there are next-level black holes.
They’re called quasars and are considered to be some of the most destructive objects
in the universe.
More than a million quasars have been discovered to date.
They are extremely bright active galactic nuclei that are powered by one or more supermassive
black holes.
If an active quasar gets close to the Earth, we’d be in trouble.
The nearest galaxy to Earth that has a quasar, Markarian 231, is about 600 million light-years
from Earth, and it is feeding off two black holes!
Even if, for some reason, it grows to an incredible size, it won’t reach our planet.
Eventually, its black hole will deplete its supply of gas and dust.
Then, like all others, the black hole will run out of material and the quasar’s powerful
light will shut down.
But this will take billions of years.
When Australian scientists discovered a quasar called J1144, they were stunned.
It’s 500 times as massive as the blackhole in the center of our galaxy - Sagittarius
A*.
The accretion disk of the supermassive blackhole that powers the quasar is the brightest scientists
have ever observed.
This is because of the black hole’s massive event horizon and the extreme rate at which
it pulls in matter.
Scientists believe the properties of J1144 set a record that may never be broken.
Black holes are difficult to spot because they don’t give off any light.
But when black holes pull matter towards the event horizon, they do it so quickly that
this matter transforms into extremely hot plasma, which gives off light in a ring around
a black hole known as an accretion disk.
And although it’s located in the constellation Centaurus, some seven billion light-years
from Earth, J1144 can be seen with a telescope pointed at exactly the right part of the sky.
Scientists have almost run out of sky regions where black holes like this could be sitting.
But predictions show there should be around 40 quintillion black holes in the universe,
which is just about 1% of all matter.
So there's still a chance that even a larger and more voracious black hole is out there
somewhere.
The brightest of quasars, J1144, isn’t threatening our existence.
But are all of them safe for us?
If a glowing giant quasar were to appear in our vicinity, it would almost certainly engulf
our entire star system.
Quasars emit energies of millions, billions, or even trillions of electron volts.
This energy exceeds the total of the light of all the stars within a galaxy.
The brightest objects in the universe shine anywhere from 10 to 100,000 times brighter
than the Milky Way.
All these cosmic monsters sound a little scary.
But is there really anything we have to worry about?
Most black holes sit in one point of space and absorb objects that fall within the range
of their gravity.
Another one of the closest black holes to us, V616 Monocerotis, is more than 3,000 light
years away.
So even if this monster absorbs its binary partner and expands in size, it wouldn’t
affect us.
But there are even more mysterious and more powerful objects out there in space aside
from black holes and the quasars they produce…
Meet a neutron star.
It has unprecedented power which can sometimes be devastating to its neighbors.
When a huge star with a mass of more than ten suns explodes in a supernova, it doesn't
always turn into a black hole.
If it doesn’t have enough mass, its core becomes a neutron star.
Hot gas and dust are compressed in such stars to such an extent that it’s difficult to
imagine.
The Chandra X-ray telescope has identified a neutron star after the supernova Cassiopeia
A exploded.
The star’s radius is only about 10 kilometers [6 miles].
A normal star of this mass would have a radius of more than a million kilometers or over
half a million miles.
A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about 4 billion tons!
Whereas a teaspoon of solar matter, such as from our sun, would only weigh about 1.6 pounds
[725 grams].
Because of the incredible density of a neutron star, it gives off incredibly strong magnetic
fields.
So if we suddenly placed a neutron star in our solar system, those strong magnetic fields
would cause chaos.
The planets would be thrown off their orbits, and if a neutron star was close enough to
Earth, it would raise the tides so powerful they would rip our planet apart.
Luckily, there’s no neutron star in our neighborhood.
Although recently, astronomers using NASA's Swift X-ray telescope discovered a star like
this between 250 and 1,000 light-years from Earth.
This makes it the closest neutron star to the solar system.
But there are even bigger and more frightening things in space.
Galaxies often cause cosmic catastrophes and can even collide with other galaxies.
It seems there should be plenty of room for them in space.
But many galaxies get so close that they start to rotate shoulder to shoulder.
The Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture this phenomenon.
This deep-space triangle appears as the bright spiral galaxy NGC 2445, on the left, and its
dimmer companion, NGC 2444, on the right, are colliding.
The event caused a star formation in a rare triangular shape.
A similar outcome awaits our galaxy.
Scientists have put together an animation to show how the Milky way and the Andromeda
galaxy will collide.
According to researchers, the merger will begin in nearly five billion years and end
in eight billion years.
This will result in the formation of one huge galaxy, often called Milkomeda.
The solar system will probably remain intact in the newly formed galaxy.
But other stars may not be as lucky.
There are around a trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy and approximately 300 billion stars
in our galaxy.
So stars from both galaxies might be thrown into new orbits around the newly formed galactic
center.
And the two supermassive black holes at the center of each galaxy will likely merge as
well, forming a new, much larger black hole.
Scientists say that the process has already started and the two galaxies’ faint halos
have touched each other.
Today we use science to predict the future.
And it’s incredible how many new discoveries we’re making each day.
So stay tuned here to be updated on the latest space findings.
Thanks for watching!