The most Massive Black Hole. © NASA/ESA
Astronomers have found what could be the most massive black hole ever, located 5 billion light-years away.
This giant is close to the maximum size a black hole can reach in the universe and is about 10,000 times heavier than the one at the centre of our Milky Way.
Located in one of the largest galaxies ever observed, called the Cosmic Horseshoe. This galaxy is so massive that it bends space and light, shaping the glow from a more distant galaxy into a huge horseshoe-like ring.
Above: The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens. The newly discovered ultramassive blackhole lies at the centre of the orange galaxy. Far behind it is a blue galaxy that is being warped into the horseshoe-shaped ring by distortions in spacetime created by the immense mass of the foreground orange galaxy.
The black hole’s mass is estimated at 36 billion times the mass of our Sun, according to a new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Scientists believe that every galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its centre, and that the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole, with the largest known as ultramassive black holes.
Researcher Professor Thomas Collett, of the University of Portsmouth, said:
“This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive.
Most of the other black hole mass measurements are indirect and have quite large uncertainties, so we really don’t know for sure which is biggest. However, we’ve got much more certainty about the mass of this black hole thanks to our new method.”
source Royal Astronomical Society
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