Astronomers claim to discover biggest supermassive black hole yet
Click for original image.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers now believe they have discovered the heaviest supermassive black hole yet found, with a mass thought to be equivalent to 36 billion solar masses and located at the center of a distant galaxy they have dubbed The Cosmic Horseshoe.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. You can read the science paper here.
Researchers detected the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole using a combination of gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics (the study of the motion of stars within galaxies and the speed and way they move around black holes). The latter is seen as the gold standard for measuring black hole masses, but doesn’t really work outside of the very nearby universe because galaxies appear too small on the sky to resolve the region where a supermassive or ultramassive black hole lies.
Adding in gravitational lensing helped the team “push much further out into the universe”, Professor Collett said.
There is a blue-colored galaxy directly behind the Horseshoe, whose light is lensed into the blue circle as it passes through the black hole’s massive gravitational field.
It is believed, based on present theories, that this black hole is at the uppermost limit possible in mass. It also must be underlined that there are many uncertainties in this data.
Click for original image.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers now believe they have discovered the heaviest supermassive black hole yet found, with a mass thought to be equivalent to 36 billion solar masses and located at the center of a distant galaxy they have dubbed The Cosmic Horseshoe.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. You can read the science paper here.
Researchers detected the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole using a combination of gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics (the study of the motion of stars within galaxies and the speed and way they move around black holes). The latter is seen as the gold standard for measuring black hole masses, but doesn’t really work outside of the very nearby universe because galaxies appear too small on the sky to resolve the region where a supermassive or ultramassive black hole lies.
Adding in gravitational lensing helped the team “push much further out into the universe”, Professor Collett said.
There is a blue-colored galaxy directly behind the Horseshoe, whose light is lensed into the blue circle as it passes through the black hole’s massive gravitational field.
It is believed, based on present theories, that this black hole is at the uppermost limit possible in mass. It also must be underlined that there are many uncertainties in this data.