An astonishing discovery from the mysterious world of black holes may provide new clues to their existence and mechanisms is published In Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A team of astronomers led by scientists from the University of Durham, UK, has identified one of the largest known black holes in the universe, which has a mass of more than 30 billion times that of the Sun. The researchers made the discovery using a gravitational lensing effect, in which the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy excites and amplifies light from a distant object.
The researchers also used Durham University supercomputer simulations as well as super-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to look more closely at how light is bent from Black hole Within a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away from Earth. Astronomers have discovered the existence of a supermassive black hole, the first to be found using this technique.
“This black hole, with a mass of about 30 billion times the mass of our sun, is one of the largest ever discovered, and is at the upper limit of how massive black holes are in theory. It is a very exciting discovery,” says James Nightingale, lead researcher.
He adds that gravitational lensing “makes it possible to study inactive black holes, which is not currently possible in distant galaxies. This approach could allow us to discover many more black holes outside our local universe and reveal how they evolve back in cosmic time.”
Naftemporiki.gr with information from APE-MPE
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