A galaxy over the thousands of light-year-olds from Earth houses which could be the most massive black hole in the universe-with what would be the equivalent of compressing the total mass of a small galaxy in a single object.
A gigantic black hole hidden in a galaxy at 8 billion kilometers away is the most massive that was directly measured – More than 10,000 times More massive than the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, and about 36 billion times the mass of our sun.
The discovery of the black hole was presented in a sent to publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“It is very possibly the most massive black hole in the universe,” says the astrophysicist Thomas Collettresearcher at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, and co-author of the article, quoted by. “It’s the mass of a small galaxy in a uniqueness.”
The ultramassive black hole is in the cosmic horsyed, one of the most massive galaxies known, which is also the Greater “galactic lens” known – A galaxy that can amplify the light behind it due to its huge gravitational attraction.
Although previous studies suggested that an extremely massive black hole could be at the center of this galaxy, researchers had difficulty determining their exact.
To determine the mass of the black hole with greater accuracy, Collett and his team measured the speed the stars spinned aroundsince its speed depends on the mass of the black hole.
To establish limits to potential mass, researchers also measured How much light was being curved by gravity of the black hole, an effect called Gravitational lens. “Combining these two effects, we were able to do this measurement with very high confidence“, diz Collett.
Although the mass of the object is unusually large, the value found is consistent with previous works of Collett and its team, which study the way Dark matter is distributed by the galaxy.
During their most recent study, the team failed to anchor a model that adjust to the observed luminous radiation data – Unless the cosmic horseshoe had a extremely massive black hole in your center.
“It was only when we really started to allow the black hole mass to be incredibly high that We started to get good models“, diz Collett.
The authors of the study also think that the cosmic horseshoe is a call Fossil Group Galaxy – A type of star system that absorbed all your neighboring galaxies. This behavior could help explain How the black hole became so massive.
An intriguing feature remainsHowever, the black hole has now stopped growing and is numb.
“To be as great, it had to be accumulating matter basically throughout the existence of the universe. It is strange that now it is off“Collett says.“ Something made this black hole grow and grow and then stop. ”
