In the galaxy Cosmic horse iron is found The most massive black hole ever found before: a research group led by theUniversity of Portsmouth (United Kingdom) According to which the object would be 10 thousand times heavier than Sagittarius a*, the one in the center of the Milky Way.
The structure of the Cosmic Horse Galaxy (and where the black hole is located)
The galaxy, whose scientific name is SDSS J1148+1930 and it was Discovered for the first time as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. At the time the galaxy was identified as the most massive up to then identified.
The galaxy, which is located 5 billion light years away in the constellation of the lion, is actually a complex system actually made of two galaxies. As can be seen from the image, the ultra -removable black hole just discovered is found At the center of the orange galaxy.
Much further back there is one instead blue galaxy which is deformed in the horseshoe -shaped ring (which gives its name to the system) by the distortions of spacetime created by the immense mass of the orange galaxy in the foreground.
The colors with which the two galaxies are called refer to the light they emit and therefore how the images captured by telescopes come to us.
The most massive black hole ever discovered first
The gigantic black hole is 10,000 times heavier than Sagittarius a*, the black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and approaches the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe, with a mass that is equivalent to 36 billion solar masses.
And it is precisely this huge black hole that “transforming” the system in which it is in a cosmic horse iron: it is in fact so large as to distort spacetimo, distorting the light to form a gigantic Horseshoe -shaped Einstein ring.
This is among the 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and most likely the most massive – explains Thomas Collett, co -author of the research – most of the other measurements of the mass of black holes are indirect and present rather high uncertainties, so we do not know exactly what the greatest is. But we are much safer than the mass of this
The researchers detected the black hole of the cosmic horse iron using one combination of gravitational lens and star kinematics (the study of the motion of the stars inside the galaxies and the speed and the way they move around black holes).
The latter method is considered the best for measuring the masses of black holes, but it does not really work outside the universe very close, because the galaxies appear too small in the sky to precisely identify the region in which a supermassive or ultra -member black hole is located.
The addition of the gravitational lens, however, helped the team to go much further away in the cosmos.
We have detected the effect of the black hole in two ways: this first of all alters the path of light while crossing it, it also meant that the stars in the internal regions of the guest galaxy move extremely quickly, almost 400 kilometers per second. By combining these two measurements we can be completely sure that the black hole is real
The researchers now hope to use the spatial telescope data Euclid from the European Space Agency (ESA) to detect more blacks supermaxicci in order to better understand how black holes prevent galaxies from forming stars.
The work was published on Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Sources: University of Portsmouth / Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
