Scientists have found a supermassive black hole: up to 30 billion times larger than our Sun

A team of astronomers has discovered one of the largest black holes ever found, using a phenomenon called gravitational lenswhere gravity bends light.

The team, led by Durham University, used gravitational lensing, in which a foreground galaxy refracts and magnifies light from a more distant object, and supercomputer simulations at the DiRAC HPC facility, which allowed the team to get a closer look at how light works. rejected black hole in a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth.

They found supermassive black hole, an object with more than 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, in the foreground galaxy, a scale that astronomers rarely notice. They publish the discovery in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

To the extreme

this is the first black hole Found using this technique, in which the team simulates the journey of light through the universe hundreds of thousands of times. Each simulation includes a black hole of varying mass that changes the path of light to Earth.

When researchers turned on black hole supermassive in one of his simulations, the path traveled by light from a distant galaxy to Earth matched what was observed in real images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Lead author Dr. James Nightingale from the Department of Physics at the University of Durham (UK) explains that “this black hole in particular, it is about 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the largest ever discovered, and is at the upper limit of what we theoretically assume. black holes, So it’s an extremely exciting discovery.”

Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy appears to deflect light from a background galaxy, meaning that we observe it more than once. Like a real lens, this lens also magnifies the background galaxy, allowing scientists to study it in more detail.

As Nightingale explains, “most black holes the largest known to us are in an active state in which matter is attracted near black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, x-rays and other radiation.

“However gravitational lensing allow to study black holes are inactive, which is currently not possible in distant galaxies,” he says. “This approach could allow us to discover much more black holes outside of our local universe and show how these exotic objects have evolved in far cosmic time.”

future opportunities

The study, which also involves the Max Planck Institute in Germany, raises the enticing possibility that astronomers might discover much more. black holes are inactive and supermassive than previously thought, and find out how they got so big.

The story of this particular discovery began in 2004, when another Durham University astronomer, Professor Alastair Edge, observed a giant gravitational lensing arc while viewing images from the Galaxy Survey.

Nineteen years later, with the help of very high-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer facility at Durham University, Dr. Nightingale and his team were able to revisit the problem and study it more deeply.

The team hopes this is the first step towards a deeper exploration of the mysteries black holes, and that future large-scale telescopes will help astronomers study black holes further to better understand their size and scale. (Europe PreX.X)

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