A new massive black hole has been discovered, and we’re not even going to try to wrap our heads around its size.
The massive object observed for the first time is 30 billion times more massive than the Sun and located hundreds of millions of light-years away.
And don’t worry if that’s an impossible scale to imagine — even the researchers leading the project don’t quite understand it.
“Even as an astronomer, I struggle to understand how big this thing is,” James Nightingale told BBC Radio Newcastle.
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Nightingale is a study author from Durham University’s physics department, who was part of the team that made the discovery. The findings were published in Diary Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
He said in a press release that experts believe black holes cannot grow much larger than the newly discovered object, meaning it could remain one of the largest discoveries for some time.
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“This particular black hole, which is about 30 billion times the mass of our sun, is one of the largest ever seen and is at the upper limit of how big we believe black holes can theoretically be, so it’s a very exciting discovery,” Nightingale said in a press release.
The entire extent of the black hole was observed after studying the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. In the cases of entire galaxies and massive objects like them, they have such a strong gravitational pull that they can bend light.
That way, light from galaxies otherwise hidden behind other galaxies becomes more visible because of the way entities closer to Earth bend the light.
“Most of the largest black holes we know of are in an active state, where matter pulled close to the black hole heats up and emits energy in the form of light, X-rays, and other radiation,” Nightingale added.
“However, gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something that is currently not possible in distant galaxies. This approach may allow us to see many more black holes beyond in our local universe and show how these strange objects have evolved over cosmic time.”
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