Astronomers have identified What could be a new supermassive black hole, and with an estimated mass 36 billion times that of the sun, it is about 10,000 times more heavy than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. This would be part of the most massive objects ever detected.
La Découverte, published in The Monthly Avis of the Royal Astronomical Society, was made by researchers from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil. Scientists have located the signs of the new supermassive black hole in a gravitational lens known as “cosmic horshoe”, illustrated below. A gravitational lens occurs when the severity of a massive object, like a galaxy, is so large that it folds the light and the time passing near it, distorting the light moving from behind.
The Cosmic Horsehoe was discovered by the Hubble telescope in 2007. The Galaxy LRG 3-757 is in its center, while the blue horseshoe shape surrounding this yellow-colored object is deformed of the light emitted from another galaxy beyond. LRG 3-757 is one of the most massive galaxies ever observed by astronomers, having a mass 100 times that of the Milky Way, and it is around 5.6 billion light years of the earth.
Thanks to this light structure, astronomers were able to calculate the mass of the black hole which is probably in the center of the LRG 3-757 (although it is not definitively proven, the large galaxies are supposed to have a black hole in the center). Although there are no direct observations of this black hole, the measurements of the movement of light in the ring and the speed of the stars in the interior regions of the galaxy are consistent with the presence of an ultramassive black hole. “By combining these two measures, we can be completely convinced that the black hole is real,” said Thomas Collett, professor of astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth, in a press release.
Collett also suggests that a black hole of such proportions could only come from the fusion of two supermassive black holes resulting from the collision of galaxies. Astronomers are still wondering if it will be the shared fate of our galaxy, the Milky Way and Andromeda Neighbor.
What about your 618 and others?
All passionate about astronomy knows that the most massive object found in the universe so far is potentially your 618. According to the most widespread estimates, this black hole has a mass equivalent to 66 billion suns, almost double that of cosmic horses.
However, scientists are cautious about the labeling of your 618 as the most massive object ever seen. Being located more than 10 billion light years, its host galaxy and its surrounding objects cannot be observed in detail. What is little known comes from the analysis of its brightness and the theoretical models which allow us to estimate its size. Uncertainty is too high to consider it as the most massive known black hole.
On the other hand, Portsmouth researchers argue that the cosmic horsesmal hole offers a greater certainty of observation, unlike the distant and almost mythological holes like your 618. As such, they claim that their discovery could represent the most massive black hole to date.
This story originally appeared on Cable in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.
