Using the theory of space-time, astronomers have discovered one of the world’s most massive black holes , about 32.7 billion times the mass of the Sun.
The supermassive black hole , about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth, is located in the bright galaxy of the ‘Abell 1201’ galaxy cluster , the Science website said in a report Wednesday.
The astronomers who discovered it said in a statement that this “cosmic monster” was ” at the upper limit of the theoretical size of black holes,” but it was the first of several giant cosmic planets the team was able to find .
In a research paper published March 28 in the Journal of the Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers said that finding supermassive black holes is the first step in understanding how these monsters grow so big.
According to Live Science , famed physicist Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity describes how massive objects distort the fabric of spacetime. Einstein explained that gravity is not caused by an invisible force, but by our experience of the curvature and distortion of space-time in the presence of matter and energy.
This curved space sets the rules for the movement of energy and matter. According to one of the most famous predictions of general relativity, light travels through a highly curved region of space and time and begins twisting and bending through a giant mirror until it appears as an extended curve known as Einstein’s bell .
The site pointed out that astronomers can use this effect, known as gravitational lensing, to detect faint celestial bodies that cannot be seen otherwise. ” Most of the supermassive black holes that we know of are active, with material being swept up close to the black hole that heats up and emits energy in the form of light, X-rays and other radiation,” said the study’s lead author and astrophysicist . , James Nightingale of Durham University in England.
” However, gravitational lensing makes it possible to study passive black holes (they don’t feed and therefore don’t produce light), which is currently not possible in distant galaxies ,” he added.
According to Science Alert , when Nightingale and her colleagues discovered the torsional curvature of light around a dormant black hole, the researchers used information about how light stretches to reconstruct the black hole’s size.
The researchers took high-resolution images using the Hubble Space Telescope and fed the measurements from them into the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer. According to Science Alert, the researchers simulated how much mass a black hole should have.
Scientists have found that the giant cluster is about 30 billion solar masses larger , making it 8,000 times larger than the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. According to Science Alert, the largest black hole ever discovered is TON 618, which has a mass of nearly 40 billion solar masses.
Studying supermassive black holes in this way will help scientists understand how these giant planets grow to impossible sizes, as well as investigate how these monsters affect the evolution of the universe, says Live Science.
” This approach will allow us to detect large numbers of black holes outside our local universe and reveal how these strange objects reformed over cosmic time ,” Nightingale said.
