It may be the most massive black hole ever found.
36 billion times larger than the mass of our Sun, it was previously hidden from astronomers while existing at the heart of the Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy, previously photographed by space telescopes.
The giant space phenomenon bends light into a perfect Einstein ring and “whips nearby stars” at incredible speeds.
Astronomers from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in England and collaborators at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande in Brazil, made the discovery—a giant cosmic phenomenon estimated to be 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.
It is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the Universe, according to the authors of a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy is one of the most massive galaxies ever observed—so big, it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped ‘Einstein ring’.
“This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive,” said researcher Thomas Collett, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth.
Researchers detected the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole using a combination of gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics (the study of the motion of stars within galaxies and the speed and way they move around black holes).
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The latter is seen as the gold standard for measuring black hole masses, but doesn’t really work outside of the very nearby universe because galaxies appear too small on the sky to resolve the region where a supermassive or ultramassive black hole lies.
But thanks to ‘gravitational lensing’, the team pushed much further out into the universe, Professor Collett explained.
“It is altering the path that light takes as it travels past the black hole and it is causing the stars in the inner regions of its host galaxy to move extremely quickly—almost 400 kilometers per second.
“We detected the effect of the black hole,” he said in a media release.
Lead researcher, PhD candidate Carlos Melo, of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, added: “What is particularly exciting is that this method allows us to detect and measure the mass of these hidden ultramassive black holes across the universe, even when they are completely silent.”
The Cosmic Horseshoe black hole is located a long way away from Earth, at a distance of some 5 billion light-years. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts a 4 million solar mass black hole. Currently it’s not growing fast enough to blast out energy as a quasar but we know it has done in the past, and it may well do again in the future.
“It is likely that all of the supermassive black holes that were originally in the companion galaxies have also now merged to form the ultramassive black hole that we have detected,” said Professor Collett.
The discovery of the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole came as the researchers were studying the galaxy’s dark matter distribution in an attempt to learn more about the “mysterious hypothetical substance”, according to the release.
Now that they’ve proven their new method works for black holes, they hope to use data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope to detect more supermassive black holes—and their hosts—to uncover more mysteries.
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