Space is the limit. This black hole has limits somewhere
It’s the greediest black hole we’ve ever seen. A huge object that was supposed to function in the early Universe consumes huge amounts of matter. As the latest analyzes indicate, it repeatedly breaks the limits defined in theory.
The supermassive black hole in question is quite specific. We can determine that it certainly existed in the early universe, roughly 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. We can also observe it now by looking at the LID-568 galaxy, whose light reaches us from afar, so we know how much time must have passed since what we see came to our area. However, it is not the distance from Earth that makes it so unique. This supermassive black hole has an incredible appetite. It absorbs matter at a rate of more than 40 times the theoretical maximum, i.e. Eddington’s limit (or luminosity).
It has this power
When a black hole gathers cosmic material around itself, it does not absorb it immediately. Rather, it accumulates around the inner edge like water around a bathtub drain, causing friction that leads to ignition, resulting in the (unlike a black hole, which absorbs even light) accretion disk. However, this process also results in a certain type of pressure, which can sometimes equal the internal gravitational pull of the black hole. This is where Eddington’s limit is.
In the case of the LID-568 galaxy, researchers came across a puzzle – it was its exceptionally high brightness. Behind it was a supermassive black hole, which, however, is quite small (only 7.2 million times larger than the mass of the Sun).. It was this clue, combined with the extremely bright accretion disk, that led scientists to the thesis that the object absorbed a huge amount of matter. Moreover, the period during which the disk burned so brightly should not have been very long – so it is possible that the researchers were also a bit luckywhen they focused their eyes on that spot at that exact time.
The new research also answers an important question. For a long time, researchers have seen very heavy black holes in the early Universe. Such a high rate of absorption of matter may best explain their formation. The new discovery is another piece of circumstantial evidence that also indicates that in the early universe, supermassive black holes formed not from collapsing stars, but from huge stars and huge clumps of gas collapsing directly under the influence of great gravity – indicates sciencealert.com
