Ultramassive Black Hole : Discovery
Astronomers have discovered an ultramassive black hole using gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where a foreground object bends light from a distant object behind it.
- Researchers used supercomputer simulations to simulate light from a distant galaxy travelling through the Universe, each simulation had a black hole of a different mass.
- The path taken by the light in one simulation matched the path seen in actual images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, leading to the discovery of an ultramassive black hole in the foreground galaxy.
- The ultramassive black hole is over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun.
- This new approach using gravitational lensing could make it possible to study inactive black holes in distant galaxies.
- Black holes are regions of space-time where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them.
- They are formed when a massive star collapses in on itself at the end of its life, creating an incredibly dense object with a gravitational pull that is so strong that it warps space-time around it.
