Dear Steemians, here I am with my second post on Steemit! This time I wanted to share wity you another huge passion that I carry with me since I looked at stars for the very first time: astronomy! I hope you like it :)
S5 0014+81 is not a random sequence of numbers that i dreamt about the other night, but it is one of the most powerful object in the Universe, as far as we know. Since i was a kid i always have been fascinated by the concept of black holes, stars, planets and space in general, but this one has a particular relevance. Why ? Well it’s pretty obvious why, because it could erase humanity from the face of the Earth in the blink of an eye.
Scared ? Well, you should be, and let’s see the reason: let me introduce to you to this huge monster that astrophysicists like to call S5 0014+81.
Precisely it is a enormous, dense, superbright blazar located extremely far from the Earth, something like 12 bilions of light-years. If you don’t know exactly what a blazar is, well, in few words, it’s just kind of a giant elliptical galaxy that hosts a supermassive black hole in the center. Scientists discovered that S5 0014+81 has a mass corrisponding to 40,000,000,000 solar masses and a radius that is 800 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
So? Just how big it is? Well, it’s kinda impossible to answer that beacause it would be already difficult to imagine how big the Sun is, and…. this beast is way bigger than the Sun. Unfortunatly this huge blazar is not visible at the naked eye (actually this is a good thing, otherwise we all would be already dead by now), but who knows if someday far in the future, when humanity will become a III type civilization, if we will be able to capture and use part of the energy of this big boy. Surely i would like to be alive to see that but unfortunatly i think it will still take some time for humanity to be there.