Scientists Discover Black Hole So Gigantic That You Will Quiver in Existential Terror
Astronomers have discovered a black hole so mind-bogglingly large, trying to get a grasp of how big it really is could induce an existential crisis.
The black hole measures a whopping 36 billion times the mass of the Sun, making it — if the observations are confirmed — one of the biggest black holes ever spotted, as Live Science reports.
To put that into perspective, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole scientists believe is lurking at the center of the Milky Way, only has a mass of around one million times that of our Sun. A current contender for the largest black hole to have been discovered is TON 618*, which scientists believe is between 40 and 60 billion times the Sun's mass, located some 18.2 billion light-years from Earth.
The latest, still-unnamed black hole is lurking within a system of two galaxies dubbed the Cosmic Horseshoe, first discovered in 2007 in the constellation Leo.
As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, an international team of researchers suggest that the existence of a monstrous, supermassive black hole could explain the Cosmic Horseshoe's unusual appearance.
In astronomical observations, the system forms a halo of light known as an Einstein ring. As the famed physicist Albert Einstein predicted in 1915, gravitational lensing causes the light from the system's more distant galaxy to be warped by an even more massive galaxy, dubbed LRG 3-757, in the foreground.
In other words, the scientists suggest the foreground galaxy may be warping the fabric of space-time due to the enormous black hole lurking at its center.
To get to that conclusion, the researchers examined data collected by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer spectrograph located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, as well as observations taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
LRG 3-757 on its own is absolutely huge, with 100 times the mass of the Milky Way. But to account for the observed warping, the team concluded that an "ultramassive black hole" would have to lurk at its center.
While we can only guess as to how or why it got so huge, astronomers are looking forward to getting some answers with the help of the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope.
The mission was designed to create a "map of the large-scale structure of the universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky," per the agency's website.
This map could shed more light on dark matter, the mysterious stuff that scientists believe holds the structures of the universe together.
"The Euclid mission is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of lenses over the next five years," the researchers wrote in their paper. "This new era of discovery promises to deepen our understanding of galaxy evolution and the interplay between [normal matter] and [dark matter] components."
More on supermassive black holes: Scientists Turned the James Webb to Examine Black Hole at Center of Our Galaxy and Saw Something Wild
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