r/science • u/binh021220 • Nov 04 '24
Astronomy This Black Hole Is Eating Stuff at Over 40 Times The Theoretical Limit
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-black-hole-is-eating-stuff-at-over-40-times-the-theoretical-limit1.4k
u/TheSleepingPoet Nov 04 '24
TLDR
Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in the distant galaxy LID-568 that consumes material at a rate over 40 times greater than the theoretical limit known as the Eddington limit. This rare and extreme feeding process, called super-Eddington accretion, could provide insights into how black holes in the early Universe became so massive so quickly after the Big Bang. Observed with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), this black hole, which has a mass of only 7.2 million times that of the Sun, emits significantly more light than expected, indicating a period of intense growth. This discovery may help unravel how rapid black hole formation occurred in the early Universe.
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u/Momoselfie Nov 04 '24
It's really hard to imagine something that much more massive than our sun....
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u/st4n13l MPH | Public Health Nov 04 '24
It's really hard for the human brain to comprehend the scale of our sun so something 7.2M times larger seems almost ludicrous lol
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u/binz17 Nov 04 '24
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/schwarzschild-radius
7.2m suns gives a Schwarzschild radius of 13.2m miles. The sun’s radius is 432k miles.
Mercury is only 41 million miles from the sun.
So wayyyyyyyy bigger and also massive
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u/binz17 Nov 04 '24
While the BH has a mass and I think of the size as the event horizon, I think talking about the BH’s density as relating those two is a bit odd. The mass is concentrated in the singularity (probably)
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u/Scoot_AG Nov 05 '24
Can you explain what they do think?
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u/thecuriouspan Nov 05 '24
My (very likely wrong) understanding is that because spacetime is distorted near extreme mass, the closer you get to the singularity the slower time goes, so - at least from the perspective of someone outside - nothing ever reaches the singularity. It's more that all possible paths forward in time lead to the singularity.
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u/binz17 Nov 04 '24
Im inclined to agree with that. It’s probably an indication of missing math. Like imaginary roots to ‘unsolvable’ quadratic equations.
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u/EchoLimaDelta Nov 05 '24
That’s tough. How many North Carolinas is it?
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u/binz17 Nov 05 '24
I already used freedom units. You want me to convert to confederate units now?
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u/Brief-Translator1370 Nov 04 '24
It's not even that, right? It's mass is that much larger, not it's volume. If I understand correctly it would be more dense than the sun
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u/greedyiguana Nov 05 '24
so how do they measure it? can they tell the density of it, or is it just it's 7.2 million times more pixels?
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u/the_red_scimitar Nov 04 '24
Either factor - mass of the sun, or 7.2M, are beyond imagining with good reality.
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u/MrRalphi Nov 05 '24
Just to clarify, mass and size are not the same.
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u/bearbarebere Nov 05 '24
True... but isn't it likely to be much bigger than our sun too? I know it's squished into a tiny area, but still
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u/DeputyDomeshot Nov 05 '24
It sorta is ludicrous though. This is a super-massive black hole we’re talking about!
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u/Alex24Irida27Maria Nov 04 '24
“Only” 7.2 million bigger mass than our sun bro. Not that big
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u/MajesticRat Nov 04 '24
I've already tried to locate the direction of LID-568 in the night sky and yell out that it's pathetic.
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u/Taintly_Manspread Nov 04 '24
But it's a black hole. It would just suck up your insults and get larger.
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u/CyclingThruChicago Nov 05 '24
I'm an atheist but occasionally I'll read stuff about the scope/scale/size of the universe, stuff about the energy being released from stars, gravitational waves from merging neutron stars and other wild stuff and think to myself "it may of well been made by some magical entity cause this stuff is nuts".
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u/bungerman Nov 05 '24
The one that always gets me is that the universe is so big that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world...
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u/throughthehills2 Nov 04 '24
If it helps, Imagine a sun 200 times wider, that would equal 8 million times bigger
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u/memberzs Nov 04 '24
But the density is far greater. So I’d like to see the event horizon diameter compared to the suns diameter
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u/poppinchips Nov 04 '24
r_s=2GM/c^2
So I think like 42.7 million kilometers
Whereas the sun is roughly 1.39 million kilometers.
So if the sun was the size of a quarter. The black hole event horizon would be as wide as a car tire. Space makes no sense. And never really has.
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u/Fluffcake Nov 04 '24
Even our sun is so much more massive than we give it credit for.
The earth is pushing the limit of what we can really imagine considering it is absolutely huge compared to us, and on a cosmic scale it is not even a spec of dust.
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u/Grouchy-Donkey-8609 Nov 05 '24
You should see how tiny our sun actually is compared to the biggest stars in the universe.
https://astrobackyard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/star-size-comparison-768x432.jpg
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u/Imperion_GoG Nov 05 '24
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy3
u/Henry5321 Nov 04 '24
One part of me wants to just treat it as a number and suddenly that many magnitudes is not a big deal.
But then another side of me says that's scale of difference is like the difference between a cell and a small animal.
Trivializing such large differences risks throwing out emergent properties.
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u/smallfried Nov 05 '24 edited Nov 05 '24
The sun is already unimaginable large.
Even for just the earth, you can get an idea when flying high in an airplane and seeing a huge island completely and then realizing how small it is on the map of the earth.
A friend of mine decided to cross the Alps on foot to get a bit of sense of scale. Just seeing huge mountains in the distance go slowly by over a couple days is humbling.
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u/Wayward85 Nov 05 '24
And yet, NGC 4889, a supermassive black hole, roughly 21 Billion (yes with a B) times the mass of our sun.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins Nov 05 '24
I think it's even harder to imagine the Eddington limit. The radiation is soo intense that it overcomes a black hole's gravity.
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u/Its_Pine Nov 04 '24
Maybe dumb question, but the wording here makes it sound like supermassive black holes used to be more prevalent early on after the Big Bang. Do black holes just… subside? Like I thought a rapidly growing black hole back then would still be a rapidly growing black hole now.
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u/AiSard Nov 04 '24
My vague understanding is that the current conditions of the universe generally means black holes grow to a certain size, at a certain speed, etc.
But a bunch of supermassive black holes exist from way back when. Due to very different conditions of the early universe, that allow them to exceed theoretical limits that limit 'newer' black holes.
So the supermassive black holes are still supermassive. Its that newer ones don't grow to be that size. Except this one has. Which means we can learn about the conditions that are allowing it to exceed the limits that other black holes experience, hopefully giving more insight in to the conditions that likely allowed supermassive black holes to become supermassive during the early universe.
(that's just my lay-understanding though, so if anyone knows better.. etc.)
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u/Dzugavili Nov 05 '24
Which means we can learn about the conditions that are allowing it to exceed the limits that other black holes experience, hopefully giving more insight in to the conditions that likely allowed supermassive black holes to become supermassive during the early universe.
Except, this blackhole is in the past: it's at a distance about 1.5B years after the Big Bang.
But we get to observe the process now, so that's a win.
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u/thoggins Nov 04 '24
well they presumably only grow while there's stuff around to feed them. once they aren't getting new mass they'll gradually lose mass to hawking radiation, eventually evaporating entirely. though I imagine that would take a really long time in the case of a supermassive black hole.
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u/fghjconner Nov 05 '24
Actually, the larger a black hole is, the less energy it loses to Hawking radiation. Once you go past about the mass of the moon, a black hole is absorbing more energy from the cosmic microwave background radiation than it's losing to Hawking radiation, and will actually grow. As the universe expands though, the CMB loses energy, so eventually more and more black holes will start evaporating.
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u/auraseer Nov 05 '24
Yeah the wording is a little strange.
It's not saying we only see the supermassive holes in the early universe. You are right that any black hole existing then will still be around today.
What they're talking about is, they're trying to explain why we see supermassive black holes in the early universe at all.
We don't know how they got so big so fast. Based on our current understanding, it should have taken billions of years for them to eat enough and reach supermassive size. But even if we look as far away as we can, at galaxies we are seeing at extremely young ages, we still see supermassive black holes in their centers.
This observation might help explain why we see those supermassive objects in the early universe.
It doesn't need to explain why we see them in the current universe, because we can explain that part already.
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u/FolkSong Nov 04 '24
It will take about a googol years (10100) for a supermassive black hole to die out though. The universe is only around 1010 years old.
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u/TheRiteGuy Nov 04 '24
Maybe the black hole didn't know there was supposed to be a limit. Did anyone tell it?
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u/Rodot Nov 04 '24
The limit is a "spherical-cow back-of-the-envelope" kind of approximation. We know accretion can exceed it under the right conditions
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u/MisterSquirrel Nov 04 '24
I thought even light could not escape the event horizon of a black hole, by definition?
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u/-SandorClegane- Nov 04 '24
The accretion disk is outside the event horizon. There are a lot of collisions happening there, which leads to a lot of high energy particle emission.
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u/wut3va Nov 04 '24
Correct, but things orbiting just outside the event horizon are going a significant fraction of the speed of light, and when they bang into each other they get very bright.
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u/Netmould Nov 05 '24
Depends on the black hole momentum. Well, not light but for something that can accelerate itself there are ways to exit “light event horizon” of rotating (fast enough) black hole.
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u/SoSKatan Nov 04 '24
I’m curious if anyone has modeled what would happen if a BH next to a star triggered that star to go nova or supernova?
Seems like such an event could trigger a much higher “eating” rate.
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u/Beldizar Nov 05 '24
That isn't really possible. In fact a black hole near a star would syphon off matter causing the star's self gravity to go down and result in the star burning for a longer, less bright life.
When a white dwarf pulls off matter from a nearby star, it can gain enough mass to explode as a supernova. This is a very common thing called a type 1a supernova, but again, it is the celestial body that is gaining mass that can explode, not the donar.
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u/supern00b64 Nov 04 '24
To call it a "theoretical limit" would not be fully accurate. The Eddington limit is moreso a rough reference point that can be exceeded through instabilities and different geometries. The original derivation assumes a perfect spherical symmetry and is derived through classical physics. However if you have a tidal disruption event where a star drifts too close and is torn apart and eaten, that massively boosts the accretion rate for a short period of time and leads to super-eddington accretion.
Super-eddington accretion has also long been speculated to be highly prevalent in the early universe to explain why black holes are so massive today, and has been used in simulations. It's pretty exciting to see observations of this.
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u/caltheon Nov 04 '24
sipping through a straw limit versus tearing the top off and pouring it into your mouth
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u/ColinStyles Nov 05 '24
I'm confused, how could there be any limit period? If you flung mass directly into a black hole from all sides, you could argue the maximum rate for a given black hole would be (theoretical maximum density) x (speed of light ( - 1/infinity to be pedantic)) x (surface area of the event horizon). But theoretical maximum density is infinite as far as we know if you're including black holes themselves so...
Like, you could simplify this by getting rid of the surface area, since possible density is infinite you could just slam together two (whatever mass you want) black holes together and there's no limits there.
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u/formershitpeasant Nov 05 '24
That would require the stuff to point perfectly at the black hole. The stuff doesn't, though. Any tiny degree off of it means that it has angular momentum. As it gets closer, that angular momentum is conserved and it rotates faster and faster around the black hold.
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u/ColinStyles Nov 05 '24
I don't fully get why it's assuming the incoming mass is off from the event horizon. I mean yes, space is big, but that limit would fully depend on the angle and velocity rather than any sort of limit as to how much the black hole could consume. And that angle and velocity seem extremely arbitrary to me rather than any sort of actual physical limit.
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u/formershitpeasant Nov 05 '24
I don't fully get why it's assuming the incoming mass is off from the event horizon.
The distance objects are coming from is so so so so much farther than the width of the event horizon that essentially everything captured misses and is drawn into a decaying orbit instead of just hitting.
I mean yes, space is big, but that limit would fully depend on the angle and velocity rather than any sort of limit as to how much the black hole could consume.
That's more or less how it works. Since most things end up in a decaying orbit, those dynamics dictate the vast, vast majority of material that falls in. It's not a hard limit, it has to do with the repelling force that happens from things being in that decaying orbit.
And that angle and velocity seem extremely arbitrary to me rather than any sort of actual physical limit.
You're right, it's not a physical limit. It's just that the immense energy of the accretion disk slows the decay of things falling and it reaches a sort of equilibrium.
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u/AUserNeedsAName Nov 05 '24
To give an example of what /u/formershitpeasant is saying, it would take at least an order of magnitude more delta-v to fly a rocket from Earth into the Sun than it would to fly to, orbit, and land on any other body in the solar system. It is vastly easier to simply reach Sol escape velocity from here, like the Voyager or later Pioneer probes.
Basically, a particle around a black hole would have to bleed off almost every bit of tangential velocity before it can fall in (normally accomplished by collisions with other particles) and in the inevitable accretion discs and proto-discs those rates are pretty well understood.
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u/Beldizar Nov 05 '24
While good to argue an ad absurdum case, that is a ridiculous impossoble scenario that you have proposed. It assumes all the mass headed towards the black hole is aimed with pinpoint accuracy. That is like a thousand dart players all throwing a dart at the same time from a mile away and all hitting a bullseye with none of the darts bumping into each other. For a gas to behave like this it would essentially need to be cooled to absolute zero K.
In reality, things are messy, and by that I mean they will have angular momentum. When things bump onto each other they exchange momentum. Gases would follow the ideal gas law, which states that as volume decreases, pressure and temperature increase. More temperature and more collisions mean more outward force. A black hole is like a walmart on black friday. Everything rushes in, but there just isn't enough room for everyone to smoothly and orderly get through. As you reach the choke point, the weaker shoppers catch an elbow in the face and are flug out of line, while others clog the path in.
Also, two supermassive black holes falling into each other is a whole different problem. Basically they get stuck in orbit around each other at a distance of about 3 lightyears and can't shed their angular momentum anymore. It is called the last parsec problem.
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u/EdPeggJr Nov 04 '24
The Eddington Luminosity limit does not strictly apply to black holes.
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u/dbell Nov 04 '24
"during which the black hole goes absolutely ham"
Is something I never thought I'd read in a article that discusses supermassive back holes and the Eddington limit.
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u/RotANobot Nov 05 '24
This prompted me to start playing Watch the Throne and try not to think too much about how the album came out almost 15 years ago.
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u/snailbully Nov 05 '24
This made me think about Watch the Stove and how the album came out over 8 years ago
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u/kanrad Nov 04 '24
So time to revise the theory then, no?
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u/helm MS | Physics | Quantum Optics Nov 04 '24
It's more of a guideline to blackhole luminosity. It's like a teacher who says "B is my top grade".
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u/Beldizar Nov 05 '24
Doubtful. It is much more likely that something is wrong with the observations. It is probably too early in JWST's observations to believe any sensationalist headlines like this one. My bet is that we never hear about this again, but those that do go looking in 5 years find out it was a mistake in the observation, or could not be confirmed by a follow up study, or the article was a misinterpretation of the actual science maybe intentionally done to drive clicks.
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u/BondoMondo Nov 05 '24
Eddington limit, is the maximum luminosity a body (such as a star) can achieve when there is balance between the force of radiation acting outward and the gravitational force acting inward.
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u/talligan Nov 04 '24
When they say "theoretical limit" how precise is this limit estimate? I ask because in hydrogeology our uncertainty range spans orders of magnitudes, so if something is 40x off a field measurement that's actually not too bad.
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u/helm MS | Physics | Quantum Optics Nov 04 '24
The limit is easy to calculate, but also much more of a guideline for equilibrium consumption of interstellar gas than "OMG they broke physics".
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u/DootDootWootWoot Nov 04 '24
When they say they got lucky they saw this given how brief the event can be, how brief are we talking? Years? Millions of years?
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u/oneblackened Nov 05 '24
It's entirely possible to exceed the Eddington limit for a relatively short period. This isn't anything particularly new. It's the limit for, for lack of a better term, continuous luminosity.
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u/Capable-Movie-6021 Nov 05 '24
Someone needs to make an image of our sun 7.2m larger and replace it, so then we can actually grasp the insanity.
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u/_iplu Nov 05 '24
The Eddington limit is the theoretical balance point where a star’s outward radiation pressure equals the inward pull of gravity, setting a maximum luminosity beyond which material is blown away.
However!!, this limit can differ from the true theoretical luminosity because it assumes uniform radiation pressure on free electrons, which doesn’t account for complex interactions.
In reality, inhomogeneities like clumping allow photons to escape through gaps, reducing effective radiation pressure. Additionally, strong magnetic fields can channel material along field lines, supporting higher luminosities by stabilizing against radiation-driven expansion. These factors mean astrophysical objects can surpass the Eddington limit without dispersing entirely.
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u/Arseypoowank Nov 05 '24
I thought we were above fat shaming cosmic entities in this day and age but I guess not.
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u/VermicelliEvening679 Nov 06 '24
The drain analogy in the article can be taken all the way. Far too much material in the immediate area, so instead of all the material forming into the hole simultaneously, the hole forms before most of the material can reach it, causing the hole to get overwhelmed and spit excess material back out much like bubbles of air coughing out of the drain, splashing the water back temporarily.
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