The bending of light in spacetime has revealed a supermassive monster in a very distant galaxy, an ultramassive black hole with the size of more than 30 billion times the mass of our Sun. It is one of the largest black holes. gigantic that astronomers have been able to discover in the deep Universe. At the center of the galaxy cluster known as Abell 1201, located 2.7 billion light years away from the Solar System, a cosmic monster lurks.
Astronomers were able to detect it thanks to the curvature of light in space-time, an effect known as gravitational lensing that forms a kind of magnifying glass towards the deep Universe. But it is not a simple supermassive hole, whose mass would be limited to a few billion solar masses, but it is so massive that astronomers have given it the name ‘ultramassive’.
Ultramassive black hole found with cosmic magnifying glasses
With a total of 32.7 billion solar masses, the ultramassive hole demonstrates the effectiveness of gravitational lensing in finding mega-distant objects in space. Astrophysicists believe it could be one of the largest objects inhabiting the cosmos, as it closely borders the theoretical threshold.
This particular black hole, which is about 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the largest ever detected and is at the upper limit of how big we think black holes can theoretically get, so “Which is an extremely exciting discovery,” explains James Nightingale, an astrophysicist at Durham University in the United Kingdom and lead author of the new study.
There are an impressive number of black holes in space, but unless they are actively devouring matter, it is very difficult to detect them. These types of objects do not emit light on their own; instead, we must look for the effects they produce on the matter they have nearby in order to detect them in the vast Universe.
“Most of the largest black holes we know of are in an active state, where matter approaching the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, X-rays and other radiation,” Nightingale said.
But the ultramassive black hole, on the other hand, is not very active and is not devouring matter around it. So astrophysicists had to turn to other ways to observe it: gravitational lenses. The researchers arrived at the cosmic monster by analyzing the magnification of the foreground object in a series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope where a gravitational lens appears.
The large amount of matter in the Abell 1201 cluster caused a deformation of space-time, bringing the objects behind it closer as if it were a cosmic magnifying glass. Mathematical models were used to simulate the amount of light that bends around the foreground galaxy, where the ultramassive hole resides. Testing thousands of black hole sizes, they finally arrived at a solution that matched the observations, a total of 32.7 billion solar masses.
“This [gravitational lensing] approach could allow us to detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time,” Nightingale concluded. For now, it is believed that the black hole found is one of the largest that exists in the Universe, an astonishing discovery that can help us better understand how the dynamics of cosmic devourers work.
This story was written in Spanish by Alejandra Martínez in Ecoosfera
