A reminder: Tonight (March 25) I’m speaking at the Akron (OH) Public Library about the April 8 total solar eclipse!

I’ll be giving that eclipse talk at the Boston Museum of Science on April 3, and in Rochester NY on April 6, too.

I hope to see some of y’all there!

It’s been a minute since I’ve read some astronomy news that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

This news actually sent icy cold fingers strumming along my spine, too: Astronomers have found a supermassive black hole that’s eating the equivalent of more than the Sun’s mass every single day.

Every. Day. An entire star’s worth of material. Holy CRIPES.

OK, let’s take a step back, and let me walk you through this so that by the end you too can share this feeling of awe and terror I’m experiencing.

Quasars are a special class of galaxy: They have extremely bright cores, sometimes outshining the rest of the entire galaxy’s stars combined. They were discovered in the 1960s and were a huge mystery until a few pieces of the puzzle fell together, and now we understand them much better.

At the center of every big galaxy, a far as we can tell, is a ridiculously huge black hole, so big we call them supermassive black holes, or SMBHs. The Milky Way has one, called Sgr A*, which has a little over 4 million times the Sun’s mass. It’s actually underweight for a galaxy our size; the SMBH in the galaxy M87 is 6.5 billion solar masses. Big. 

If material is falling into that SMBH, it doesn’t just fall straight in. The galaxy is rotating, so that material has angular momentum — similar to linear momentum, but it’s the tendency of a spinning or revolving objects to stay spinning or revolving —  which means as it falls to the galaxy center it starts revolving faster. This material forms an immense disk just outside the SMBH’s point of no return, called an accretion disk (to accrete means to gain in size by adding stuff). These are small for regular stellar-mass black holes, but in galactic centers they can be light-years across.

Material near the center is screaming around the black hole at very nearly the speed of light, but that motion is slower the farther out you go. That means this material is rubbing against itself, hard. The friction heats it up incredibly, sometimes to millions of degrees. More. Anything that hot will glow, and it’s that accretion disk that blasts out so much light it can outshine the rest of the galaxy.

Galaxies like this are said to have active galactic nuclei, or AGNs. Sometimes the galaxy itself is referred to that way. There are lots of kinds of AGNs, which depend on properties astronomers observe in them; it’s likely they’re all just variations on the same physical setup, but we see them differently depending on, for example, our viewing angle on the disk.

Quasars are one kind of AGN. These are among the most luminous objects in the Universe, blasting out so much energy we can see them from billions of light-years away. Well over a million quasars have been mapped in the sky, some fainter, some shockingly bright. 

And that brings us to the quasar SMSS J052915.80–435152.0 — let’s call it J0529 for short. It was found in a broad survey of the sky, and clearly was remarkable. It’s at a redshift of 3.962, which means the light we see from it left the quasar some 12 billion years ago (you can think of it as being 12 billion light-years away if you like, though that gets complicated fast). It shines at an apparent brightness of 16^th magnitude, which is pretty faint in our sky (the faintest star you can see with your eyes is about 6^th mag), but remember, this thing is far away. For it to be seen at all at such tremendous distance means it’s hellishly luminous.

In a new study [link to journal paper], astronomers calculate its luminosity to be 2 x 10⁴¹ Watts.

That’s terrifying. I mean, oof. The Sun’s luminosity is 4 x 10²⁶ Watts, so this quasar is blasting out light at a rate one quadrillion times that of our local star. A quadrillion. This is tens of thousands of times brighter than the entire Milky Way. At least.

I’m glad it’s so far away. If Sgr A* ever decided to do something like that, we’d get cooked. Not that it can: The SMBH in the center of quasar J0529 is likely 17 billion times the mass of the Sun, thousands of time beefier than our local SMBH. It has a lot more gravitational reach, and is capable of much bigger feeding frenzies.

Which brings us to the question of just how much it’s eating.

How much energy an accretion disk emits depends in part on how much material is falling into the black hole, so it’s possible to work backwards from the luminosity to get the accretion rate. And this is where this story really goes bonkers.

They find that the black hole is increasing in mass by a little over 400 times the Sun’s mass every year. That means more than the Sun’s mass every day.

That’s… a lot. Like, a LOT a lot. I know it’s hard to grasp just how big the Sun is, but it has 330,000 times the mass of the Earth. The black hole is eating that Every. Single. Day.

Doing the math, that means this enormous black hole is gobbling down the equivalent of 4 Earths EVERY SECOND.

EVERY SECOND AIIIIIEEEEEEEEE

Looks around you. Everything you see, for as far as your eye can ascertain, plus everywhere else you’ve ever been, everywhere almost everyone has ever been. Plus more, including the entire interior of the planet… and it’s all gone in a quarter of a second.

That’s how fast this monster is stuffing material into its gob. And it does this every second of every day for years and centuries and likely many many millennia.

This is more than just the scariest object in the cosmos. Remember, we see this black hole as it was when the Universe was barely over a billion years old, but it’s already at 17 billion suns worth of mass. How did it grow so fast? We see massive SMBHs even farther away, seen when things were even younger, and it’s hard to understand how they got so big so fast. This is one of the thorniest problems in cosmology, so studying the most extreme examples helps us put limits in that growth rate, giving us boundaries that can help reign in the models and calculations.

Quasar J0529 can tell us a lot about conditions in the cosmos even earlier than when we see it, like a time capsule of the infant Universe. I’m glad those astronomers found it, even if reading — and writing — about it gave me the heebie jeebies. In a good way. 

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