Ancient Black Hole As Heavy As A Billion Suns Is Pointed Right At Us

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An ancient black hole believed to be as heavy as billion suns is pointing right at Earth.

The black hole, known as a ‘blazar’ is thought to be around 13 billion years old, but it’s only recently been detected because of the masses of light it has been giving off.

Blazars belong to a class of objects called active galactic nuclei (AGN), characterised by supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the centre of a galaxy, that feed on gas, dust and stars.

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Detecting them can be extremely difficult, as blazars are only visible along a very narrow line of sight. If astronomers on Earth are not within the line of sight of the blazar, they won’t be able to see it. This blazar, however, is visible, and is one of the earliest and most distant SMBHs observed.

The discovery of the blazar, named PSO J0309+27, was made by a team led by Silvia Belladitta, a graduate student at the University of Insubria in Italy. Belladitta is currently working for the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) alongside doing her Ph.D.

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Speaking of her discovery in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, via Phys.org, Belladitta said:

The spectrum that appeared before our eyes confirmed first that PSO J0309+27 is actually an AGN, or a galaxy whose central nucleus is extremely bright due to the presence in its centre of a supermassive black hole fed by the gas and the stars it engulfs.

In addition, the data obtained by LBT also confirmed that PSO J0309+27 is really far away from us, according to the shift of the colour of its light toward red or redshift with a record value of 6.1, never measured before for a similar object.

Belladitta said how it’s ‘extremely important’ to observe blazars because for every one discovered, there’s thought to be 100 similar to it but, due to their orientation (not pointing towards Earth) they are difficult to see.

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She added:

Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets.

This result places tight constraints on the theoretical models that try to explain the origin of these huge black holes in our universe.

The difference between a blazar and a typical AGN is the fact it points towards Earth. In order to be considered a blazar, the jets that give off huge amounts of light have to be pointed directly at us.

Blazars become ‘active’ because of ionised gas around them, which fuels its emissions to be ‘seen at many wavelengths’. They give off powerful relativistic jets that are so bright they can be seen across the whole universe.

To expand on how big it actually is, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is four million times the mass of the sun, while this blazar is the mass of a billion suns.

Pretty cool, huh?

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Niamh Shackleton

Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.