Scientists have discovered a supermassive black hole headed straight for Earth, but they don’t care, even though this hole is capable of swallowing up our galaxy, the Milky Way, and probably dozens of neighboring galaxies.
Black holes form when one or more stars “die”, creating a gravitational field so large that nothing, not even light, can escape.
The black hole PBC J2333.9-2343 is 657 million light-years away from Earth, meaning it won’t reach us anytime soon.
By comparison, this black hole has an area 40 times larger than the Milky Way, spanning over a million light-years.
According to the Royal Astronomical Society, it is one of the largest black holes ever discovered, and until recently scientists thought the hole was a galaxy, and they had doubts about its “behavior,” the paper said. Washington Examiner.
Lorena Garcia, a researcher at the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics and lead author of the study that reclassified the black hole as a “radio galaxy,” was quoted as saying by the newspaper, “We started studying this galaxy because it showed strange properties.” And, “Our hypothesis is that the relativistic jet (center) of the supermassive black hole has changed its direction, and we had to make a lot of observations to confirm this idea.”
Unique properties also revealed the galaxy’s age.
“Seeing that the core no longer feeds into the lobes means they are very old. They are remnants of past activity, while structures near the core represent younger, active jets.”
Although the size of the black hole is frightening, it is far away.
To understand how far this black hole is from Earth, a rocket traveling at 18,000 miles per hour would take 37,000 years to travel one light year.
This black hole is 657 million light years away from us.
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