Researchers Revealed: Black Hole P13 Swallowing Gas Faster than Earlier Believed

University of Strasbourg Astronomers recently took a long look at the Galaxy’s black hole P13, located approximately 12 million light years from Earth. It has been observed that the object was 100 times brighter than our Sun, that’s why it was usually presumed very large.

Dr Roberto Soria of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) stated, “The maximum speed at which black hole could swallow gas and produce light was strongly determined by its size. So, it makes sense that P13 was bigger than the ordinary, less bright black holes present in our Milky Way galaxy.”

Moreover, the researchers said that, there is no hard and fast rule to predict how much a black hole can swallow. Certainly, P13’s donor star is 20 times heavier than our Sun and one side of the star is always brighter than the other, researchers stated.

Dr Sooria further stated that, “It actually enabled us to gauge the time it takes for P13 and the donor star to revolve around each other, which is 64 days, and to model the velocity of the two objects and the shape of the orbit. From this, we concluded that the black hole was 15 times less than the mass of our Sun.”

The black hole was swallowing gas from the ‘donor’ star at the rate of 10X larger than what was formerly believed, researcher claimed. Simultaneously, P13 is ingesting a weight equivalent to 100 billion hot dogs every min.

Though, hot dogs seem to be a bad choice for the measurement purpose, as their weight is not standardized. But, as per the reports of Self Nutrition Data, they are equivalent to 1/10^th of one pound. With the help of this data, we can presume that the black hole is swallowing 5 quadrillion (5,000,000,000,000,000) tons of gas per minute.

This study is published in ‘Nature’ Journal.