The blackhole was first detected using a 2.3 metre telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in New South Wales (NSW).The research team then turned to one of the largest telescopes in the world – the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile – to confirm the full nature of the black hole and measure its mass.”The light from this black hole has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us,” said Professor Rachel Webster from the University of Melbourne said.“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.
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