Using space-time trickery, astronomers have discovered one of the most massive black holes, about 32.7 billion times the mass of the Sun.Scientific alert“.
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 on Wednesday. Bending of light during deviation of its path.
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 could find using the technique. , according to the site.Direct science“.
In a research paper published on March 28, the researchers wrote: Journal of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical SocietyFinding supermassive black holes is the first step to figuring out how these monsters grow so large.
According to Live Science, famous physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of 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 how energy and matter move. According to one of the most famous predictions of general relativity, light travels through a highly curved region of space and time and begins to twist and bend through a giant mirror until it appears as an extended curve known as “Einstein’s bell.” Direct science.
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 we know are active, with material being pulled in close to the black hole heating up and emitting energy in the form of light, X-rays and other radiation,” said the study author and astrophysicist. James Nightingale at Durham University in England.
“However, gravitational lensing makes it possible to study passive black holes (they do not feed and therefore do not produce light), which is currently not possible in distant galaxies,” he added.
According to Science Alert, when Nightingale and his colleagues discovered the torsional curvature of light around a dormant black hole, the researchers used information about how it stretches light to reconstruct the size of the black hole.
The researchers took high-resolution images using the Hubble Space Telescope and entered measurements from them into the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer. According to Science Alert, researchers simulated how much mass a black hole would have to bend light.
Scientists discovered 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, Live Science says.
“This approach will allow us to detect a large number of black holes outside our local universe and reveal how these strange objects have re-formed over cosmic time,” Nightingale said.
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