While observing the galaxy, British astronomers discovered a giant black hole with a mass of 30 billion suns and is located in the center of the galaxy, which is hundreds of millions of light years away from us. They describe the black hole as very massive, because it does not even fall within the definition of the usual supermassive black holes, which are many times smaller.
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Astronomers have discovered a black hole traveling through space
It was discovered thanks to gravitational lensing
Black holes are invisible in space because they absorb all surrounding matter, including light. An alleged gravitational lensing, which was created by the galaxy in which it was originally observed, helped scientists make the discovery. Thanks to its gravity, light bends and can bring very distant objects closer together. Thus astronomers can track very distant objects in space almost back to the beginning of the universe.
„This particular black hole, with a mass of about 30 billion times the mass of our sun, is one of the largest ever discovered and is at the upper limit of the size of black holes in theory, making it a very exciting discovery.“according to eurekalert.org The lead author of the study, Dr. James Nightingale, who added that gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes in distant galaxies that are no longer pulling in surrounding matter, which is how active black holes are detected.
A team of astronomers has discovered one of the largest black holes ever discovered, taking advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The results have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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– Royal Astronomical Society (RoyalAstroSoc) March 29, 2023
The team determined the size of the black hole space.com Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope and computer modeling, they determined how much light is bent around the foreground galaxy. This black hole is also the first to be discovered using this method. Since it is not very active, it absorbs little of the surrounding material and therefore does not emit X-rays. And it is precisely because of these parameters that it is almost impossible to study such black holes with anything other than gravitational lensing. So scientists hope that this is just the beginning of the study of distant black holes.