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Despite its enormous size, the newly-found black hole has been termed a “dormant” one, meaning it is not actively swallowing matter from its surroundings. Researchers behind the major discovery have described the black hole as a “cosmic behemoth.” Read on to know more about it.
The supermassive black hole is located five billion light-years away from the Earth (Photo credit: iStock).
Scientists may just have discovered the largest-ever black hole that holds a mass equivalent to that of a whopping 36 billion suns. The supermassive black hole is five billion light-years away from the Earth. Its size is close to the theoretical upper-limit of what is possible in the universe, and is located at the centre of a giant galaxy in the Cosmic Horseshoe system — named for its horseshoe-shaped ring of light formed by gravitational lensing. The enormous black black hole is as much as 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy — Sagittarius A* — which has a mass equivalent to that of 4.15 million suns.
What did scientists say about the black hole?
Thomas Collett, author of the study and a professor at the University of Portsmouth in England, said of the discovery: “This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive.” Collett added, “Most of the other black hole mass measurements are indirect and have quite large uncertainties, so we really don’t know for sure which is biggest. However, we’ve got much more certainty about the mass of this black hole thanks to our new method.”
How was the gigantic black hole found?
Researchers managed to discover what they have described as a “cosmic behemoth” using a combined method of gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics, which is the study of the motion of stars within galaxies as well as the speed and manner in which they move around black holes. Despite its gigantic size, the newly-found black hole has been termed a “dormant” one, meaning it is not actively swallowing matter from its surroundings, much like the Sagittarius A* black hole (also a dormant one).
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