Posted on 03/17/2016 6:36:54 PM PDT by MtnClimber
upermassive black holes are the most extreme objects in the known universe, with masses millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun. Now astronomers have been able to study one of these behemoths inside a strange, distant quasar and they’ve made an astonishing discovery — it’s spinning one-third the speed of light.
Studying a supermassive black hole some 3.5 billion light-years away is no easy feat, but this isn’t a regular object: it’s a quasar that shows quasi-periodic brightening events every 12 years or so — a fact that has helped astronomers reveal its extreme nature.
Quasars are extremely bright accretion disks in galactic cores driven by copious quantities of matter falling into the central supermassive black hole. The vast majority of galaxies are thought to contain supermassive black holes, though modern galaxies have calmed down and quasars no longer shine. But it’s a different story for galaxies that are billions of light-years away.
The object at the center of the strange quasar called OJ287 “weighs in” at 18 billion solar masses and is one of the biggest supermassive (or ultramassive?) black holes in the known universe. Interestingly, it is also one of the most well-studied quasars as it is located very close to the apparent path of the sun’s motion across the sky as seen from Earth — a region where historic searches for asteroids and comets are regularly carried out. Therefore, astronomers have over 100 years of serendipitous brightness data for OJ287, allowing them to predict when the next flaring event would be.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Gotta have a quasar by you for a disco ball.
You beat me to the #blackholesmatter jokes.
Well, someone had to do it. lol
An update to this story. A team from India predicted the next flash to within 4 hours. As the event happened behind the sun at the time only the Spitzer probe was positioned in a place to see it happen. General Relativity verified yet again.
Thanks for the update!
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