Most powerful black hole blast discovered

Posted on Thursday, 29 November, 2012 | Comment icon

9 comments | News tip by: Still Waters

Image credit: ESO

A blast fives time more powerful than anything ever seen before has been found flowing from a black hole.

Located 11.5 billion light years away, the enormous gravity well has a mass equivalent to three billion suns and is situated at the center of an extremely bright and energetic class of galaxy known as a quasar. Astronomers were able to measure the speed of the flow and determine that it was putting out more than 400 times the weight of our sun every year at 18,000 miles per hour.

"We were hoping to see something like this, but the sheer power of this outflow still took us by surprise," said astronomer Nahum Arav. "I believe this is the smoking gun for several theoretical ideas that use the mechanical energy output of quasars to solve several important problems in the formation of galaxies and cluster of galaxies."

Astronomers have witnessed a record-breaking blast of gas and dust flowing out of a monster black hole more than 11. 5 billion light-years away.

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Source: National Geographic

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Recent comments on this story

#1 Posted by Pyridium on 29 November, 2012, 3:24

great article. Think of the sun hitting you in the face on a beautiful day, now multiply that heat by 2 trillion. That quasar is putting out a lot of heat. It is spewing out the equivilent of 400 of our suns per year. This is a great view of how a feeding black hole can actually create the birth of 10-100 new galaxies. Just imagine how massive that black hole really is as it swallows up more mass than it is spewing out along the quasar jets.

#2 Posted by Eluus on 29 November, 2012, 11:55

That gave me the goosebumps

#3 Posted by 27vet on 29 November, 2012, 12:14

Didn't Hawking say that Black Holes ain't so black? I guess we are lucky there isn't one too close to our solar system.

#4 Posted by keithisco on 29 November, 2012, 15:32

Classically, Quasars derive their energy from the accretion disk surrounding a Black Hole (normally a Supermassive Black Hole) so what they are feeding on is material gathered by the Black Hole - not from matter being ejected by a Black Hole (Hawking Radiation). This is very different from the OP.

#5 Posted by OldN8Dogg on 29 November, 2012, 17:33

Truly humbling...we are so small.

#6 Posted by paperdyer on 29 November, 2012, 20:11

Can someone please explain how something comes out of a black hole when I've always thought that everything gets sucked into one?

#7 Posted by csspwns on 30 November, 2012, 3:52

dat blast might have taken some aliens with it :(

#8 Posted by SameerPrehistorica on 30 November, 2012, 5:04

Black holes are scary

#9 Posted by 27vet on 30 November, 2012, 8:55

See post #5 above.

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