Black hole (Image: ESA/NASA)
According to foreign media reports: Astronomers at the University of Durham in the UK used gravitational lenses and the “DiRAC COSMA8” supercomputer to find out that there is a mass of 30 billion times the sun that is millions of light years away from the earth. Supermassive black holes. It is one of the largest black holes in the universe ever discovered. The so-called gravitational lens is a way of observing distant light sources by using gravity. Scientists can analyze the source and magnitude of gravity through the shape of light distorted by gravity. Scientists use gravitational lensing to use nearby galaxies as giant magnifying glasses to magnify farther stars, so that they can carefully observe how black holes hundreds of millions of light-years away from Earth bend light.
Scientists have always believed that in every galaxy, including the Milky Way where the sun is located, there will be a supermassive black hole in the center, and the mass of this supermassive black hole can be 10 billion to 40 billion times that of the sun. But these black holes are difficult to observe, and their origins are unclear. Scientists believe it was formed billions of years ago when the universe was still very young, when multiple massive galaxies merged. The research team is very excited about this discovery. Cosmic observer James Nightingale (James Nightingale) said that limited by past observation methods, scientists generally can only find black holes that are “in an active state”. State” black holes are included in the observation list, so that people have more opportunities to explore the evolution process of the universe.
Sagittarius A* (Image: EHT Collaboration/Wikimedia Commons,CC BY4.0）
Scientists previously discovered that there is a huge black hole in the center of the Milky Way, named “Sagittarius A*”, and the mass of this black hole is about 4.3 million times the mass of the sun. However, compared with the super giant black hole with a mass of 30 billion times the sun discovered this time, it is much smaller. In May 2022, an international team of scientists released the first image of Sagittarius A*. In 2019, an international team of scientists released the first black hole photo in history. The image taken at that time was the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy.
