One of the largest black holes ever recorded has been discovered using a new technique that astronomers say could see thousands more of the voracious celestial monsters in the coming years.
An ultramassive black hole, one of only four ever observed, is more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, a new study has found. It’s the first black hole ever observed using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which light traveling towards us from a distant galaxy appears to expand and bend inward, revealing the presence of a dark giant.
James Nightingale, an astronomer at Durham University in the UK and lead author of the study, told AFP the process was “akin to a light shining through the bottom of a wine glass”. He said it was “a great coincidence” that light from a galaxy in the distant universe traveled extremely close to this black hole, which is roughly two billion light-years from Earth.
It could even be the largest black hole ever recorded, but it was hard to say for sure given the various techniques and uncertainties, he added. Supermassive black holes sit at the center of galaxies and use their enormous gravitational pull to engulf stars like specks of dust, preventing even light from escaping.
Previous black holes of this size have been observed when their voracious gobbles emit huge amounts of light at the edges – or by measuring the orbits of stars that accelerate as they pass by.
However, these techniques only work for galaxies relatively close to Earth. Landscape for “dramatic change” Gravitational lensing allows astronomers to “discover black holes in the other 99 percent of galaxies that are currently inaccessible,” Nightingale said.
Around 500 gravitational lenses are currently known – at least one of which is now a supermassive black hole. But “the landscape is going to change dramatically,” Nightingale said.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, which is scheduled to launch into space in July, will usher in an “era of big data” for black hole hunters by creating a huge, high-resolution map of the universe, he said.
In the next six years, Euclid could find 100,000 new gravitational lenses, potentially pointing to thousands of previously hidden black holes, Nightingale added.
For the latest discovery, the researchers used computer simulations and images from the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm their findings and also rule out other possibilities, such as an excess concentration of dark matter.
The massive size is also consistent with what would be expected for a black hole at the center of its giant host galaxy, Nightingale said. The mass of all the stars in the galaxy, called Abell 1201, is more than a trillion times that of our Sun, meaning it would be expected to have a particularly large black hole at its center.
Written by: Vaishali Verma
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