00:00visit chandra's beautiful universe rex j0320-35 astronomers have discovered a black hole that is
00:12growing at one of the fastest rates ever recorded this discovery from nasa's chandra x-ray observatory
00:19may help explain how some black holes can reach enormous masses relatively quickly after the big
00:24bay the black hole weighs about a billion times the mass of the sun and is located about 12.8 billion
00:31light years from earth meaning that astronomers are seeing it only 920 million years after the
00:37universe began it is producing more x-rays than any other black hole seen in the first billion years of
00:43the universe the black hole is powering what scientists call a quasar an extremely bright
00:49object that outshines entire galaxies the power source of this glowing monster is large amounts
00:56of matter funneling around and entering the black hole while the same team discovered it two years
01:02ago it took observations from chandra in 2023 to discover what sets this quasar racks j0320-35
01:10apart the x-ray data reveal that this black hole appears to be growing at a rate that exceeds the
01:17normal limit for these objects when matter is pulled toward a black hole it is heated and produces x-rays
01:24and optical light this radiation creates pressure by pushing out on the matter which counteracts the
01:31force of gravity pulling the matter in toward the black hole when the amount of matter becomes large
01:36enough the pressure from the radiation overpowers the force of gravity giving a limit on how quickly
01:41matter can typically fall toward a black hole called the eddington rate scientists think that black
01:47holes growing more slowly than the eddington rate need to be born with masses of about 10 000 suns or
01:53more so they can reach a billion solar masses within a billion years after the big bang like they have
01:58observed in racks j0320-35 a black hole with such a high birth mass could directly result from an exotic
02:07process the collapse of a huge cloud of dense gas containing unusually low amounts of elements heavier than
02:13helium conditions that may be extremely rare if racks j0320-35 is indeed growing at a high rate
02:22estimated at 2.4 times the eddington limit and has done so for a sustained amount of time its black hole
02:29could have started out in a more conventional way with a mass less than 100 suns caused by the implosion of
02:36a massive star by knowing the mass of the black hole and working out how quickly it's growing the
02:42researchers were able to work backwards to estimate how massive it could have been at birth with this
02:48calculation astronomers can test different ideas about how black holes are born this result has
02:55implications for how some of the universe's first generation of black holes formed which remains
03:00one of the biggest questions in astrophysics
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