Artist’s impression of a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy/ESA/Hubble/Digitized Sky Survey
2023.03.30 Thu posted at 13:15 JST
（ＣＮＮ） A team led by astronomers at Durham University in England has discovered one of the largest supermassive black holes ever observed. The results were published in a paper published in the Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society.
According to the paper, the mass of this star is more than 30 billion times that of the Sun. Using images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the team confirmed the mass through gravitational lensing and supercomputer simulation techniques.
Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon in which light coming from a distant object is bent by a galaxy in the middle. These galaxies act like magnifying lenses.
The team simulated the light arriving from space while changing the mass of the black hole in the assumed galaxy. It is said that the number of times reached several hundred thousand times.
According to the society, this is the first time a black hole has been discovered using such a method.
James Nightingale, lead author of the paper and an observational cosmology major at Durham University’s Department of Physics, said, “This black hole is one of the largest ever observed and is extremely exciting because it is at the theoretical upper limit of black hole size. It’s a discovery,” he says.
“Most of the largest black holes we know are active, sucking in nearby matter, emitting heat, and releasing energy in the form of light,” he said, adding that “gravitational lensing is active. It will enable the study of black holes that are not possible,” he stressed.
Such black holes in distant galaxies could not be studied before, but the new method “will allow us to find more black holes beyond our local universe, revealing evolutionary processes that go back far back in time.” It’s possible,” he said.
The story of the discovery dates back to 2004, when astronomer Alastair Edge, also of Durham University, noticed a giant arc due to gravitational lensing while reviewing survey images of the galaxy. This time, the team went back to the discovery, conducted a detailed investigation using the Hubble Space Telescope and the supercomputer “DiRAC COSMA8”, and arrived at the results.
Supermassive black holes are some of the most massive objects in the universe and are seldom found. Its origin is unknown, but one theory is that it formed from a collision of galaxies billions of years ago. It is theorized that stars were lost in collisions between galaxies, and the mass of black holes increased, resulting in the birth of supermassive black holes.
