Scientists Say They Have Just Discovered The Heaviest Black Hole — Weighing 36 Billion Times The Mass of The Sun

Astronomers have made another significant breakthrough in the arena of black hole exploration. A team of experts believes they have detected what appears to be one of the heaviest black holes uncovered to date, according to Earth. This specific black hole appears to be placed in the centre of a galaxy around six billion light-years away. Findings regarding this discovery have been published in the journal Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The black hole was supposedly present in a foreground galaxy within a rare gravitational lensing system known as the Cosmic Horseshoe. The system was first detected in 2007 by astronomers. The massive black hole was spotted by an approach that combined stellar dynamics and gravitational lens modeling. Estimates suggested that the black hole lurking in the centre of the faraway galaxy weighed around 36 billion times the mass of the Sun.

The huge mass of this black hole led researchers to categorize it as an Ultra-Massive Black Hole (UMBH), according to Science Alert. Though there is no strict description associated with the term, experts typically use it for a supermassive black hole (SMBH) exhibiting more than 5 billion solar masses. 

The lensing foreground galaxy where the black hole has been detected is labelled LRG 3-757. This body has been deemed a Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG), which appears very bright when viewed in infrared light. Data suggests that this galaxy is around 100 times larger than the Milky Way. LRG 3-757 is one of the most massive galaxies ever detected in space. The placement of an SMBH verifies the assertion made by previous studies that such black holes are typically found in massive galaxies, specifically massive ellipticals like LRG 3-757, and not dwarf galaxies. 

In order to measure the black hole embedded in LRG 3-757, researchers used data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer spectrograph in Chile's Atacama Desert and images captured with the Hubble Space Telescope, reported Live Science. Through the data, experts garnered insights regarding the speed and pattern followed by stars that move around the galaxy, as well as the gravitational lensing exhibited by LRG 3-757. 

Researchers concluded that the dataset associated with both the galactic phenomenon could only align if an ultramassive black hole existed within the body. Experts also determined the size of this black hole with the insights, which came out to be around 36 billion times the mass of the Sun. Only a few black holes heavier than this one have been uncovered by researchers. The largest one to date is believed to be Ton 618, which is  66 billion times the mass of our sun.

Astronomers are yet to figure out how exactly this black hole was formed. The team has noted some uncanny observations around this black hole. Researchers noted that the motion of the stars around the black hole is less random and slower than what they expected, as per the UMBH's size. Experts speculate that this could be because some of these peculiar stars were ejected during previous galaxy mergers. Another reason could be that this black hole at one point had powerful jets, which impacted star formation. 

Experts are optimistic that they will get answers to their questions about this black hole in data that is set to be gathered by the Euclid space telescope. "The Euclid mission is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of lenses over the next five years," the authors stated. "This new era of discovery promises to deepen our understanding of galaxy evolution and the interplay between baryonic [regular matter] and [dark matter] components."