Astronomers have discovered a giant black hole that is two-thirds the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way. The black hole is forty billion times the mass of the sun, which means it could hold 40 billion suns, like the one in our solar system.
But there's no need to fear, as the black hole in question is located more than 700 million light-years away from planet . Specifically, researchers have located it in Holmberg 15A, a giant galaxy at the center of a galaxy cluster called Abell 85.
How was the discovery of the largest black hole ever measured?
As reported in a publication by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, researchers were able to discover the black hole when they observed the unevenness in the galaxy's brightness.
Holmberg 15A is an elliptical galaxy, meaning it was formed by the collision or merger of two large galaxies. Given its colossal size, the galaxy should be very bright, but it doesn't. Instead, the galaxy's center was very faint, leading scientists to conclude that it contains a giant black hole.
Using data from the USM Wendelstein Observatory and the MUSE spectrometer on the VLT, astronomers were able to determine the size of the black hole, which has a “mass of 40 billion solar masses.”
This particular discovery, besides being impressive, also adds support to the current methodology for finding distant black holes.
"With each merger, the black hole gains mass and the center of the galaxy loses stars. Astronomers could use this relationship to estimate the masses of black holes in more distant galaxies, where direct measurements of stellar motions close enough to the black hole are not possible.".
It seems that 2019 is the year of black holes, as recently, the public was able to see the first image of a black hole, a bright disk of gas and dust with a dark center. It is located in the galaxy Messier 87, which is 55 million light-years from Earth.
Additionally, scientists recently discovered a completely new class of undiscovered black holes using a new technique, which will now become the basis for discovering millions of other black holes in the universe.
