At a distance of 2.7 billion light-years, in a galaxy cluster called Abell 1201, lies an extremely massive black hole that measures more than 32.7 billion times the mass of our Sun.
These new measurements exceed astronomers’ preliminary estimates of at least 7 billion solar masses. This is one of the largest black holes that astronomers have ever discovered.
Our universe is filled with black holes, including supermassive black holes that are at the center of galaxies in all regions of space around us. Many of them are inactive and do not emit matter, which causes them to glow, so they are easier to spot. Others are “homeless” black holes, wandering through space as they please. Some of them are extremely massive.
These black holes are much larger than supermassive black holes like those at the center of galaxies. And because they are so massive and contain so much mass, theoretically they should be easier to find. However, it all depends on how active the black hole is and how much heat it radiates. This is because, by default, ultramassive black holes (and black holes in general) do not emit light.
This makes it very difficult to find them in the blackness of space, where light plays a big role in finding things. One way astronomers look for black holes is called gravitational lensing. This technique involves astronomers observing how light travels through space. In the case of this ultramassive black hole, light bends exponentially around it.
This is because when light approaches a massive object in space, it travels around it, stretching out and creating a magnifying effect that distorts the image in the background. It is also useful for finding galaxies that are too far away for us to observe without extreme zooming. A team of astronomers first noticed light bending around this ultramassive black hole at the center of Abell 1201 in 2003.
However, it wasn’t until 2017, when astronomers discovered the second “smear,” that they began to investigate this discovery in more detail. They recently ran simulations, finding that for light to bend around a black hole in this way, its mass would have to be about the same as that of 30 billion suns, making it large enough to be an ultramassive black hole.
The researchers who discovered this object published their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It is hoped that gravitational lensing will allow us to delve even deeper into the universe and detect more ultramassive black holes like this one, already in the top ten largest black holes we have discovered.
Recall that the NASA space telescope explored the “James Webb” exoplanet the size of the earth.
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