8/3/2023 0 Comments Space black hole![]() “This approach could let us detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time. The supermassive black hole, which is likely around 20 million times the mass of our Sun, is zooming through the universe at about 3.5 million miles per hour. Gravitational lensing, however, makes it possible to locate and study “inactive” black holes in distant galaxies, which was previously impossible. “Most of the biggest black holes that we know about are in an active state, where matter pulled in close to the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, X-rays, and other radiation,” says Dr Nightingale. Confirming the size also involved using supercomputer simulations and images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. ![]() Essentially, scientists observed how the black hole’s extreme gravitational pull bent light from a nearby galaxy – kind of like a magnifying glass – as it warped surrounding spacetime. ![]() The first actual image to be produced came in 2019, allowing us to view a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun by looking at the hot, bright disk of material that surrounded it.įor the first time, this most recent ultramassive black hole was spotted using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. But ironically, given their size, they’re very difficult to spot. A black hole is a dense, compact object whose gravitational pull is so strong that within a certain distance of it nothing can escape, not even light. It’s thought that every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre. Black holes are regions of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. What are black holes, exactly? Well, they’re essentially places in space – often the result of a collapsed star – that produce so much gravity that even light can’t escape their clutches. The supermassive black hole, which is likely around 20 million times the mass of our Sun, is zooming through the universe at about 3.5 million miles per hour. This, he says, makes it an “extremely exciting discovery”. According to Dr James Nightingale, the lead author of the report and a researcher in the physics department at the University of Durham, it’s actually on the “upper limit” of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become (between 10 and 40 billion times the mass of the sun). The line of stars is more than 200,000 light years long, which means the black hole left its galaxy around 40 million years ago.In fact, at around 33 billion times the mass of the sun, the black hole is one of the biggest ever found by astronomers. At the tip of the trail, van Dokkum and his colleagues found a bright knot of ionised oxygen, indicating that the black hole is slamming into the gas around it as it hurtles away at speeds around 1600 kilometres per second. Quasars, the most extreme phenomena in the universe, are triggered when galactic collisions deliver gas to feeding. It is most likely that the massive object is a supermassive black hole that once resided at the centre of the galaxy. The most powerful black holes in the universe may finally have an explanation. “It looks to the eye like something shot out of that galaxy, and now something very massive is barrelling through space at incredible velocities.” “There’s this weird straight line that points to the heart of this little galaxy, and we’ve never seen something like that before,” says Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University, who spotted this oddity. A black hole is what remains when a massive star dies and its matter is squished together into an incredibly tiny space. The fast-moving black hole, which is roughly 3. Some black holes are a result of dying stars. A supermassive black hole is racing across the universe at 110,000 mph (177,000 km/h), and the astronomers who spotted it don't know why. This compression can take place at the end of a stars life. ![]() The strong gravity occurs because matter has been pressed into a tiny space. A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a trail of stars leading away from a galaxy nearly 11 billion light years away, which may indicate a supermassive black hole that has been flung away and is leaving bursts of star formation in its wake. This is because the black hole’s gravitational field warps space-time, the fabric of the universe, and light must follow this distorted path. A black hole is a region in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape. Artist’s impression of a runaway supermassive black hole with stars in its wakeĪ cosmic behemoth seems to have escaped its home galaxy. ![]()
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