A group of astronomers has discovered a supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to 30 billion of our own suns. It is one of the largest black holes ever observed and Dr James Nightingale from the Physics Department at Durham University says about the discovery:
This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery.
The astronomers used a so-called gravitational lens to detect the black hole. It is the first time a gravitational lens has been used to detect black holes. In a press release, they describe how it was done:
The team, led by Durham University, UK, used gravitational lensing – where a foreground galaxy bends the light from a more distant object and magnifies it – and supercomputer simulations on the DiRAC HPC facility, which enabled the team to closely examine how light is bent by a black hole inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years from Earth
In the video clip below, Science Today talks a little more about the discovery of the enormous black hole and the technology used to find it. The image above shows an illustration of the newly discovered black hole.
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