Although the Sun is the hottest body in our solar system, its temperature is negligible compared to many other cosmic bodies. So where is the hottest place in the universe?
Daniel Palumbo of Harvard University told live scienceto. He added that feeding black holes, which spew out huge jets of matter “very close to the speed of light,” are particularly hot.
The hottest place in the universe so far, Palumbo said, is Quasar 3C273, a glowing region around a supermassive black hole roughly 2.4 billion light-years from Earth. The core temperature of this region is about 10 trillion degrees Celsius, according to the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia. However, according to Palumbo, this is only an estimate at the moment.
Is the candidate among the black holes?
Supermassive black holes are extremely powerful and are found at the cores of most galaxies. Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is millions of times more massive than the Sun. Like all black holes, quasar 3C273 has such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.
While this space monster is frozen inside, the ring of gas circling it, the accretion disk, is the opposite. As particles are sucked into the black hole at a high speed, temperatures of several trillion degrees Celsius can be released due to the friction created by the collision of matter. To put this in perspective, the Sun’s surface is 5,500 degrees Celsius. These temperatures only rise when the black hole’s intense magnetic field converts some nearby matter into radiation, which can shoot millions of light-years into space.
There are also temporary phenomena that go far beyond this
However, according to Koushik Chatterjee of the Black Hole Initiative, the answer to the question of where is the hottest place in the universe also depends on when we ask the question. While he agrees that black holes are probably always the hottest place, any place where “catastrophic events occur will be the hottest place”.
When two large celestial bodies collide, the resulting explosion can produce extremely high temperatures. For example, the collision of two neutron stars can reach a temperature of 800 billion degrees Celsius, according to a study published in Nature Physics in 2019. The collision of a black hole with a neutron star can also reach incredibly high temperatures, Chatterjee said. . But like the flash, these cosmic collisions are only temporary.
It’s also difficult to pinpoint the hottest place in the universe because “it’s hard to study the temperature of very distant objects. You can’t just measure it with a thermometer,” Palumbo said, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the exact temperature of black holes.
Instead, scientists measure the energy from supermassive black holes that emit beams of light, radio waves, and X-rays. Researchers can estimate the temperature based on models that take into account the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation emitted by these sources.
“With our telescopes, we’re looking at very distant objects,” Richard Kelly, NASA’s chief solar scientist, told Live Science. “This light goes to a sensor that can measure the energy or wavelength of the radiation, then we build a spectrum and by analyzing the spectrum we infer the temperature.”
A future X-ray observatory, the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), will help scientists measure the high-temperature gases in space with greater precision, Kelly said. With further development of already advanced instruments, scientists could find hotter regions of quasar 3C273.
I think it would be very fair to say that the tools we currently have for understanding the temperature of matter around supermassive black holes are limited, but they are rapidly improving.
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