Researchers discovered a black hole that is eating up gas from a nearby star 10 times faster than scientists thought was possible.
The black hole, dubbed P13, is located about 12 light years away and is ingesting in weight the equivalent of 100 billion hot dogs every minute, the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
Researchers first noticed the object because it was much brighter than other observed black hole, but researchers thought it was just larger. As gas is pulled in by a black hole it gets extremely hot and luminous.
"It was generally believed the maximum speed at which a black hole could swallow gas and produce light was tightly determined by its size," International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research astronomer Roberto Soria said. "So it made sense to assume that P13 was bigger than the ordinary, less bright black holes we see in our own galaxy, the Milky Way."
When the researchers measured the mass of P13 they found it was not large at all, and was actually on the smaller side. The only explanation was the black hole was consuming an extremely high amount of gas.
"There's not really a strict limit like we thought, black holes can actually consume more gas and produce more light," Soria said.
The researchers observed one side of the black hole's host "donor" star was brighter because of the X-rays from the object, causing it to vary in brightness as it moved.
"This allowed us to measure the time it takes for the black hole and the donor star to rotate around each other, which is 64 days, and to model the velocity of the two objects and the shape of the orbit," Soria said. "From this, we worked out that the black hole must be less than 15 times the mass of our Sun."
The researcher compared the black hole to a world-famous hot dog eating champion.
"As hotdog-eating legend Takeru Kobayashi famously showed us, size does not always matter in the world of competitive eating and even small black holes can sometimes eat gas at an exceptional rate," he said.
