According to astronomers, one of the largest black holes ever detected has been identified using a new technology that could detect thousands more of the voracious celestial monsters in the coming years.
According to a new study, the ultramassive black hole, one of only four ever discovered, has more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun.
First Black Hole Discovered Using Gravitational Lensing
It’s an “extremely exciting” discovery that offers up “tantalizing” prospects for detecting more black holes, according to the researchers.
The researchers, led by Durham University in the United Kingdom, used gravitational lensing, a technique in which a nearby galaxy is used as a huge magnifying glass to bend light from a more distant object. This allowed them to closely analyze how a black hole inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years away bends light.
Supercomputer models and Hubble Space Telescope photos were also utilized to validate the black hole’s size.
According to a news release from the Royal Astronomical Society, this is the first black hole discovered via gravitational lensing, with the scientists modeling light passing across the universe hundreds of millions of times.
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Ultramassive Black Holes
According to the news release, the narrative of this particular finding began in 2004 when a fellow Durham University astronomer, Alastair Edge, a research fellow, observed a massive arc of a gravitational lens while studying photographs of a galaxy survey.
The team has now returned to the discovery and expanded on it with the assistance of NASA’s Hubble telescope and the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer.
The most enormous objects in the universe, ultramassive black holes, are a rare find for astronomers. Their origins are unknown, but some believe they were generated billions of years ago by the merging of galaxies.
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