Astronomers have discovered one of the largest black holes inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth through gravitational lensing for the first time, opening the field for detecting other black holes and investigating their origins.
Gravitational lensing is where a foreground galaxy bends light coming from a more distant object and magnifies it. By taking a closer look at how light is bent by a black hole, scientists led by Durham University in the UK have found an ultramassive black hole in the foreground galaxy with a mass of more than 30 billion times that of our Sun a scale rarely seen.
First Black hole found
The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is the first black hole found using the technique, which the team used to simulate light traveling through space hundreds of thousands of times, they said.
They also said that each simulation included a different mass black hole that altered the path of light to Earth. When scientists included an ultramassive black hole in one of their simulations, the path that light from a distant galaxy took to reach Earth matched the path in real images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Gravitational lensing occurs when the foreground galaxy’s gravitational field appears to bend the background galaxy’s light, meaning we see the background galaxy more than once. The lens also magnifies it, allowing scientists to study it in enhanced detail.
“Most of the largest black holes we know of are in an active state, where matter drawn into the vicinity of the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, X-rays and other radiation.
“However, gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, which is currently not possible in distant galaxies.
“This approach could allow us to detect many more black holes outside our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects have evolved further back in cosmic time,” said lead author James Nightingale, Department of Physics, Durham University.
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