“In the adolescent universe, matter was moving chaotically and feeding hungry black holes. Today, stars are moving orderly at safe distances and only rarely plunge into black holes,” Webster said.The intense radiation comes from the accretion disc — made of rapidly rotating gas — around the black hole, which is the holding pattern for all the material waiting to be devoured, the researchers said.”It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second,” Wolf said.”This storm cell is seven light years across, which is 50 per cent more than the distance from our solar system to the next star in the Galaxy, alpha Centauri,” he added.Later observations and computer modeling have determined that the quasar is gobbling up the equivalent of 370 suns a year — roughly one a day. Further analysis shows the mass of the black hole to be 17 to 19 billion times that of our sun, according to the team. More observations are needed to understand its growth rate.The quasar is 12 billion light-years away and has been around since the early days of the universe. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.(With PTI and AP inputs)
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