The hottest place in the universe may be the quasar 3C273, with an estimated temperature of about 10 trillion degrees Celsius.
Quasar 3C273 in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo: NASA
Although the sun is the hottest object in our solar system, it is quite cool compared to some other celestial bodies. The hottest places in the universe are very close to supermassive black holes, especially those that are feeding on gas, said Daniel Palumbo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. Feeding black holes have relativistic jets, giant beams of matter that are propelled close to the speed of light and are extremely hot, according to Live Science .
The hottest place in the universe known to scientists is quasar 3C273, an extremely bright region around a supermassive black hole 2.4 billion light years from Earth. The region has a core temperature of more than 10 trillion degrees Celsius, according to the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia. However, the temperature estimate is still uncertain.
Supermassive black holes are extremely powerful and are found at the center of most galaxies. As their name suggests, they are enormous. For example, 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 a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, including light, can escape. Counteracting this pull is a ring of gas that rotates around the black hole called an accretion disk.
As molecules are sucked into a black hole at high speeds, the friction created by the collision can generate temperatures of trillions of degrees Celsius. By comparison, the surface of the Sun is 5,500 degrees Celsius. That temperature only increases as the black hole's intense gravity smashes nearby matter into the relativistic jet that shoots into space, Palumbo said.
But the answer to the hottest place in the universe may depend on when the question is asked, says Koushik Chatterjee, a research fellow at the Black Hole Initiative. When two large objects collide, the explosion they create can produce extremely high temperatures. For example, two neutron stars, the collapsed cores of large stars, collide and produce temperatures of up to 800 billion degrees Celsius, according to a 2019 study in the journal Nature Physics. A black hole colliding with a neutron star can also produce exceptionally high temperatures.
The hottest place in the universe is hard to pinpoint because studying the temperature of distant objects is a challenge. Researchers are still uncertain about the true temperature of black holes. Instead, scientists measure the energy emitted by supermassive black holes in the form of visible light, radio waves, and X-rays. They can estimate the temperature based on the wavelength patterns of the electromagnetic radiation produced by these sources.
A future X-ray observatory called the X-ray Imaging and Spectrometry Mission (XRISM) will help scientists measure high-temperature gas in the universe more precisely. With more advanced instruments, they may be able to find regions even hotter than quasar 3C273.
An Khang (According to Live Science )
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