Thread: Ancient supermassive black hole blasts powerful death beam towards Earth

A supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to one billion suns has blasted a deadly ‘jet’ in the direction of Earth. The snappily named beast is called PSO J0309 + 27 and came into being more than 10 billion years ago – which should also give you a clue about just how worried you should be about its death beams. Astronomers believe the monster is currently feasting on gas and stars, which explains why it’s burping out radioactive emissions. It’s a type of celestial object called a blazar, which emit beams powerful enough to be seen across the universe. It’s believed blazars that came into being way back at the dawn of time are the ‘seeds’ for all supermassive black holes that exist in the Universe today. Silvia Belladitta, a PhD student at the University of Insubria said: ‘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. ‘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.’ You don’t need to worry about the death beams, because even though they would easily kill you we are quite safe here on Earth. The light from the hole began its journey to our planet 13 billion years ago, which means it’s 13 billion light-years away from us – a flabbergastingly long distance.


So what would happen if a black hole suddenly appeared on the horizon? Last year, scientists offered the world a new way of working out what would happen if Earth smashed into one of these dark beasts. Spoiler: our lovely planet would get sucked in and obliterated, resulting in the death of every single living organism. Simply put, a black hole is a massively dense object with such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape. Once you cross a hole’s ‘event horizon’ there is basically no chance of getting away and beyond this threshold lurks the ‘singularity’ where a huge mass is crammed into an infinitely small space. The ‘Black Hole Collision Calculator’ lets you work out what would happen if a cosmic colossus hit our planet.

A black hole at the centre of a galaxy called M87. This is the first-ever picture of one of the galactic beasts (Source: Getty Images North America) We calculated what would happen if the biggest black hole ever discovered smashed into us – and the numbers aren’t pretty. The largest supermassive hole ever discovered is called TON 618 and is believed to has a mass equivalent to 66 billion suns. This would mean its event horizon – the gaping maw of a hole and its point of no return – would stretch for well over 100 million miles. If our planet smashed into it, the collision would unleash… wait for it… 32,204,195,564,497,649,676,480,000,000,000,000 megajoules of energy. This is (our calculations suggest) the equivalent of more than 500 septillion Hiroshima nuclear bombs (500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). The black hole would barely even register the collision, with its event horizon growing just 0.000000000000004%.

Read more: Ancient supermassive black hole blasts powerful death beam towards Earth | Metro News

Why do these dimwits keep calling then black holes?
It's obviously more of a black point.

Are the readership teenagers? The writing is appalling.

Some teenagers write better than adults.


The end is nigh☺

So we'll be toast in just a few billion years?

^Could be sooner

Looks like it has already ripped M87 a new arsehole in the relatively nearby Virgo Cluster.



The Milky Way coud be next...