Holy sess . A group of astronomers have found a black hole containing ( checks notes ) 30 billion times the mass of our Sun . That ’s more than seven thousand time the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way .
The team used gravitational lensing to see the calamitous muddle . In this natural phenomenon , massive object ’ gravitational line of business turn photon of light magnifying and warping them — make it possible to see object that would otherwise be hidden or too weak . Last year , a squad distinguish the oldest known star in an electric discharge of gravitationally lensed light .
accord to a Durham Universityrelease , the freshly notice black hole is the first ever discover using gravitative lensing . A paper about the find ispublishedtoday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
An artist’s depiction of a black hole warping light around it.Illustration:ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey, Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org), N. Bartmann
“ This particular black hole , which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our Sun , is one of the boastful ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we conceive black holes can theoretically become , so it is an extremely exciting breakthrough , ” say James Nightingale , a physicist at Durham University , in the university release .
The team identified the black pickle by modeling the unlike pathways light might take through the cosmos , reckon on the bearing of inglorious jam of variegate mass . They then compared the figurer information with images of the cosmos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope . Lo and behold , they found a match .
The giving know disgraceful jam is TON 618 , a 40 - billion - solar - mass black hole sitting 10.37 billion sluttish - years aside , according to LiveScience . Ultramassive black jam are classified as those between 10 billion and 40 billion solar masses , concord to NASA .
A graphic showing how the Hubble data lined up with the computer simulated image.Graphic:Durham University
“ Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study dormant black holes , something not presently possible in distant extragalactic nebula , ” Nightingale added . “ This approach could let us discover many more black holes beyond our local creation and give away how these alien object evolved further back in cosmic time . ”
In other words , even those black hollow quietly lurking in space — not the active astronomic nuclei that are accreting superheated textile and spewing energy out into space — can be study and incorporate into mordant hole datasets .
Finding more black hollow of such giant scale could also help astrophysicist work out out an enduring puzzle : exactly how black hole grow and what defines the limits of their size of it .
Clarification : Due to an redaction erroneous belief , an earlier edition of this clause state that the newly come upon smutty hole is “ more than seven times the size of the supermassive black fix at the center of the Milky Way . ” While that ’s technically accurate , the blackened cakehole is in fact over 7,000 time the size of the Milky Way ’s central pitch-dark hole .
More : Astronomers Spot Two Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course
AstronomyBlack holesMilky WayPhysical sciencesSagittarius A
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