It is one of the most massive
black holes ever discovered.
Scientists have identified an
ultra-supermassive black hole 30 billion times the mass of our sun hiding in an
image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Black holes are born when
colossal stars many times the size of our sun run out of fuel, and collapse in
on themselves in spectacular fashion. The resulting singularity is incredibly
dense and boasts a gravitational pull so powerful that light itself cannot
escape it.
Astronomers attempting to
unravel the secrets of these insatiable singularities have to contend with a
unique cosmological problem: how can you understand something that you cannot
physically see?
As their name suggests, black
holes emit no light of their own, and they have no conventional surfaces on
which a nearby light source could reflect. However, scientists can still shed
light (pun intended) on the nature of black holes by examining how they affect
the surrounding universe.
For example, feeding black
holes draw in material from nearby clouds, planets, and stars, which becomes
superheated as it spirals ever closer to the event horizon, triggering the
release of visible light, X-rays, and other forms of radiation.
Because of this, feeding black
holes are relatively easy to see, and understand. On the flip side, black holes
that aren’t actively consuming mass are incredibly difficult to spot.
In a new study, scientists were
able to detect the presence of a leviathan, hidden black hole, by solving the
riddle behind the creation of an arc of light in an image from the Hubble Space
Telescope.
The strange curve in the Hubble
image - which can be seen in the explainer video embedded above - was created
by a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, wherein the influence of a
massive object warps the path of light travelling towards Earth from a distant
background light source, such as a galaxy.
A team of scientists ran a
series of supercomputer simulations in an attempt to identify the source of the
lensing captured in the image. Each recreation explored how the presence of
black holes of varying masses embedded in a foreground galaxy could bend the
light emanating from the more distant background galaxy in different ways.
The team discovered that they
could recreate the unique lensing seen in the Hubble image by introducing a
monstrous black hole to the simulation, which, embedded in the heart of the
closest galaxy, had a mass the equivalent to 30 billion Suns.
If the singularity does indeed
exist as the simulations suggest, it would be “one of the largest black hole
masses measured to date and qualifies it as an ultra-supermassive black hole”,
according to the new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society. However, the authors also note that
further investigation will be needed “to draw firm conclusions”.
The scientists hope that their
research will lead to a deeper understanding of the enormous black holes
lurking at the heart of every large galaxy.
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