Featured Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Tian Li, University of Portsmouth
Astronomers have discovered what could be the most massive black hole ever found.
Located around five billion light-years away, the enormous object sits at the centre of galaxy SDSS J1148+1930 and weighs as much as 36.3 billion suns.
To put this in perspective, the humongous black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way weighs just 4.3 million solar masses, making this newly discovered giant roughly 8,400 times more massive.
Scientists aren't exaggerating either. This discovery is so extreme that scientists say it no longer fits the 'supermassive' category.
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Instead, they're calling it 'ultra-massive,' a designation reserved for the universe's most colossal black holes.
"This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive," said Thomas Collett, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth.
"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."
Theoretically, black holes can grow forever, but in reality, they're limited by time. But, since the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old, even the most ambitious black hole could only reach about 50 billion times the mass of the Sun before running out of time.
Finding these ultra-massive black holes requires specific detection methods. This is where something called gravitational lensing comes into play.
The galaxy's gravity can act like a magnifying glass in space, creating a unique pattern known as the Cosmic Horseshoe. This is a curved arc of light surrounding a central blob that resembles a horseshoe shape when viewed from Earth.
The blob is so massive that it magnifies the light from a more distant light source, causing a smear effect.
Scientists led by Carlos Melo-Carneiro of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil were studying one of these horseshoes when they discovered the ultra-massive black hole.
"This discovery was made for a 'dormant' black hole – one that isn't actively accreting material at the time of observation," Melo-Carneiro said. "Its detection relied purely on its immense gravitational pull and the effect it has on its surroundings."
What makes SDSS J1148+1930 a groundbreaking find is that it's what's known as a fossil galaxy, meaning it's a single, large galaxy that was once an entire cluster of separate galaxies.
The researchers believe that over billions of years, all the galaxies in the original cluster gradually merged. Since each galaxy had its own supermassive black hole at its centre, these black holes eventually combined as well, creating one enormous 36-billion-solar-mass black hole.
Finding new clues like these might be just what astronomers need to figure out how black holes end up being so incredibly huge.
