While the world is worried about diseases, corruption, wars, and asteroids, the sad truth is that in the Universe there are phenomenons way more powerful that can obliterate us in a split second. Of course, nobody’s saying that diseases or huge asteroids are not dangerous enough, but sometimes we should focus our attention on other things as well.
A newfound supermassive black hole shooting rays of monstrous radioactive energy towards Earth is PSO J0309 + 27.
10 billion light-years away
This is the amount of distance that separates our planet from the cosmic beast. This also means that the devastating radiation needs 10 billion years to reach our planet, and nobody would bet that humanity will find the secret for eternal youth until that moment. The supermassive black hole doesn’t have ‘supermassive’ in its title for nothing: its mass is about a billion times the mass of our sun.
Silvia Belladitta, who is a PhD student at the University of Insubria, confirms this by saying:
We estimate that the central engine that powers PSO J0309 + 27 is a black hole with a mass equal to about a billion times the mass of our Sun.
She also suggested that the discovery makes astronomers learn more about the early Universe:
Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that already in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets. This result places tight constraints on the theoretical models that try to explain the origin of these huge black holes in our universe.
Although perhaps nobody would mind living for 10 billion years, nobody will get the chance to face the deadly radiation from the PSO J0309 + 27 supermassive black hole head-on. The death beam won’t visit us during our lifetime, and we have to admit that we’re not sad because of it.
