Astronomers Discover Colossal 36-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole
Astronomers have uncovered a black hole of such immense size that comprehending its scale could trigger an existential crisis. This colossal black hole, measuring a staggering 36 billion times the mass of the Sun, stands as one of the largest ever observed, according to Live Science.
For comparison, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has a mass of only about one million times that of the Sun. Another contender, TON 618*, is estimated to be between 40 and 60 billion solar masses, located approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth.
This newly discovered, yet-to-be-named black hole resides within the Cosmic Horseshoe, a system of two galaxies first identified in 2007 in the constellation Leo.
As outlined in a preprint paper, an international team of researchers proposes that the presence of an enormous supermassive black hole could explain the Cosmic Horseshoe’s peculiar appearance.
In astronomical observations, the system forms a halo of light known as an Einstein ring, a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915. Gravitational lensing causes light from the system’s more distant galaxy to bend around a foreground galaxy, LRG 3-757, which is exceptionally massive.
The scientists suggest that the foreground galaxy’s immense mass, likely due to a supermassive black hole at its core, warps the fabric of space-time.
To reach this conclusion, the team analyzed data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer spectrograph in Chile’s Atacama Desert and observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
LRG 3-757 itself is enormous, with 100 times the mass of the Milky Way. However, to account for the observed gravitational lensing, the researchers determined that an “ultramassive black hole” must lie at its center.
While the origins of such a massive black hole remain a mystery, astronomers hope to uncover answers using the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope.
Designed to map the universe’s large-scale structure by observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away, Euclid aims to shed light on dark matter, the elusive substance believed to bind the universe together.
“The Euclid mission is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of lenses over the next five years,” the researchers wrote. “This new era of discovery promises to deepen our understanding of galaxy evolution and the interplay between [normal matter] and [dark matter] components.”
