A research team led by Dr. James Nightingale from Durham University revealed that the black hole was detected using a technique called gravitational lensing, which allows them to observe distant cosmic phenomena by analyzing how they interact with passing light.
Simulation of a black hole in the Milky Way Galaxy. Image: ESA/Hubble/Digitized Sky Survey.
This supermassive black hole resides within the brightest galaxy of the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster, situated 2.7 billion light-years away from Earth. It is also one of the largest black holes ever discovered. The galaxy hosting this black hole is also affected by its gravitational influence.
“This particularly massive black hole, with a mass about 30 billion times that of our Sun, is one of the largest black holes ever discovered and lies at the ‘upper limit’ of a black hole’s theoretical size. Therefore, it is an extremely fascinating discovery,” said James Nightingale, the lead author of the study, an observational astrophysicist at the Department of Physics, Durham University. Nightingale told BBC Radio on Wednesday, “Even as an astronomer, I find it hard to comprehend just how big this is. This black hole is larger than most galaxies in the universe.”
Nightingale further explained that this colossal size challenges the scientific understanding of black holes to its limits. He also raised the question of how such an immensely massive black hole could have formed “within just the 13 billion years of the universe’s existence.”
Black holes are incredibly dense objects in space with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them. ‘Supermassive’ black holes are believed to be the largest objects in the universe and are thought to reside at the centers of massive galaxies, such as the Milky Way.
The largest supermassive black hole ever discovered by humans is TON 618, equivalent to approximately 40 billion times the mass of the Sun.
Studying these massive black holes could help scientists understand how they grow to unimaginable sizes and their impact on the universe’s evolutionary processes, according to Nightingale.