A researcher noticed an unusual curve in some data 19 years ago. We now understand that it was an ultramassive black hole, nearly two decades later.
No matter how often we hear about black holes or how prominently they appear in our fiction, black holes remain a great mystery to scientists. There’s a great deal we don’t know about these enormous gravity wells due to how difficult they are to detect and how difficult it is to directly observe them once they have been detected.
Unveiling an Ultramassive Black Hole
Therefore, each time we observe a new one, we can learn a great deal from its observation. Especially if it belongs to a subclass that pushes the boundaries or was discovered in an unusual way.
In a surprising development for researchers, the subject of this new study falls into both of these categories. Tens of billions of times larger than the Sun, ultramassive black holes are among the largest known objects.
Its discovery is “extremely exciting,” according to James Nightingale, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Durham University. At a mass of about 30 billion times that of the Sun, this object is one of the largest ever detected and is close to the limit of how large scientists think holes can theoretically grow. Intriguing circumstances led to the discovery of this monster.
Read more: Growing Concerns Over The Increasingly Armed IRS And Other Government Agencies
Gravitational Lensing Leads To The Discovery
The strange arc in the data that led to its discovery was an artifact produced by gravitational lensing, making this the first object ever discovered using this technique.
Gravitational lensing is essentially the use of an object in space as a telescope. It is frequently used to locate exoplanets. If scientists wish to examine the vicinity of a distant star to determine if it is home to other planets, but the star is too far away to observe in detail, they can position themselves so that another object stands between us and the target.
The gravity of the object in the middle will distort and magnify the light that leaves the target, enabling scientists to analyze the light from the target in greater detail and detect things such as signatures of exoplanets that they would have otherwise missed.
Intriguingly, however, examining gravitational lensing data enables you to see information about more than just the target. It also permits the collection of information regarding the object in the middle.
Scientists examined how the central object’s gravity affected the light coming from the object behind it. The central object in this case was a galaxy.
After observing the result, they ran multiple simulations to determine how massive the object in the middle must be to produce the observed gravitational effect. And what they discovered was that the middle galaxy must contain an ultramassive black hole with a mass of 30 billion solar masses.
Read more: Scientists Uncover New Species Of Box Jellyfish With 24 Eyes In China
