NASA Chandra Finds Speed-Limit Black Hole
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has identified a black hole accreting matter at rates far exceeding typical expectations, appearing to 'break the cosmic speed limit.' The discovery is shocking scientists and may require revising models of accretion physics and black hole feedback in galaxies.
The "cosmic speed limit" for a black hole's growth is known as the Eddington Limit, a concept first calculated by Sir Arthur Eddington. This limit is the point where the outward pressure of the light and radiation from the black hole's intensely hot accretion disk balances the immense inward pull of its gravity. Once this equilibrium is reached, a black hole theoretically shouldn't be able to pull in matter any faster. The black hole in question, located in a quasar named RACS J0320-35, is observed as it was just 920 million years after the Big Bang. Data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory shows it's consuming matter about 2.4 times faster than its Eddington limit allows. This rapid consumption is equivalent to the black hole swallowing between 300 and 3,000 Suns per year. This discovery could help solve a major puzzle in astrophysics: how supermassive black holes grew to a billion times the mass of the Sun in the very early universe. Standard models, which assume growth is capped at the Eddington limit, suggest they would need to start as "seeds" of at least 10,000 solar masses. Such large seeds would require exotic formation scenarios, like the collapse of enormous gas clouds. A team led by Luca Ighina of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian made the discovery by analyzing the X-ray spectrum from Chandra. The signature of the X-rays, which indicates the amount of radiation at different energies, closely matched theoretical models of a black hole accreting matter in a "super-Eddington" state. This finding is also supported by data in optical and infrared light.
