Bent Light in Deep Space Reveals One of the Biggest Black Holes Ever Detected
upstart writes:
A rare 'ultramassive' black hole, 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, is lurking in the cosmos:
Holy smokes. A group of astronomers have found a black hole containing (checks notes) 30 billion times the mass of our Sun. That's more than seven thousand times the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The team used gravitational lensing to see the black hole. In this natural phenomenon, massive objects' gravitational fields bend photons of light magnifying and warping them-making it possible to see object that would otherwise be hidden or too faint. Last year, a team spotted the oldest known star in an arc of gravitationally lensed light.
According to a Durham University release, the newly detected black hole is the first ever found using gravitational lensing. A paper about the discovery is published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
[...] The team identified the black hole by modeling the different pathways light might take through the universe, depending on the presence of black holes of varying mass. They then compared the computer data with images of the cosmos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, they found a match.
[...] "Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies," Nightingale added. "This approach could let us detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time."
A brief video explaining the process
Journal Reference:
James. W. Nightingale, Russell J. Smith, Qiuhan He, et al., Abell 1201: Detection of an Ultramassive Black Hole in a Strong Gravitational Lens, arXiv:2303.15514 [astro-ph.GA], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.15514
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.