Far from swallowing a bitter pill: black holes are famous for their insatiable hunger. Their gravitational field swallows everything that comes within range, attracting matter and gas as if there were no tomorrow. Yet, even black holes have “limits” of behavior, so to speak, and could never go beyond the infamous Eddington limit. But apparently, there is always a first rebel.
A team of astronomers has in fact discovered a black hole that has completely forgotten its manners and eats at a rate not even in the wildest dreams. With the help of space telescopes James Webb And Chandrathe researchers found LID-568a black hole in the midst of its cosmic feast: a compulsive devourer, it exceeds the theoretical absorption limit by 40 times. In short, as if you emptied the buffet at a gala dinner while everyone was looking at you.
The discovery, published on Nature Astronomyis the result of an international team led by Hyewon Suh, in collaboration with our Italian scientists fromNational Institute of Astrophysics: Federica Loiacono, Giorgio Lanzuisi, Stefano Marchesi, Roberto Decarli and Brian Lemaux.
The insatiable hunger of LID-568
But why is this LID-568 black hole so special? The researchers, observing it through several telescopes, immediately noticed that it was not respecting the Eddington limit, consuming matter as if it were trying to break a world record. It is the first known case of a black hole that eats like a maniac, exceeding the limit considered “the maximum” and thus opening a new path to understanding cosmic growth.
According to Emanuele Farinaastronomer and co-author of the study, without the Webb telescope, this black hole would have gone unnoticed. Thanks to the spectrograph NIRSpecresearchers could see it all: gas flowing out like a puff around the central black hole. A nice “glance”, which made it possible to understand that LID-568 probably indulged in a mega-binge of matter in one fell swoop.
A discovery that changes the rules of the game
When the brightness of LID-568 was incredibly high, the team realized that they were faced with an exceptional case, as the astronomer commented Julia Scharwachter:
This black hole is feeding like we’ve never seen.
This exceptional voracity demonstrates that rapid accretion mechanisms, above the Eddington limit, are among the possible causes of the growth of these black holes in the early cosmic epochs.
This discovery also leads to the hypothesis that many black holes could, in fact, grow through super-rapid accretion “episodes”. But how does it not explode? The team hypothesizes that the powerful gas outflows observed may function as a sort of “relief valve” for excess energy. Much remains to be understood, and astronomers are already ready with new observations to reveal all the secrets behind this super-caloric galactic diet.
