Holy smokes. A group of astronomers have found a black hole containing (checks notes) 30 billion times the mass of our Sun. That’s more than seven times the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The team used gravitational lensing to see the black hole. In this natural phenomenon, massive objects’ gravitational fields bend photons of light magnifying and warping them—making it possible to see object that would otherwise be hidden or too faint. Last year, a team spotted the oldest known star in an arc of gravitationally lensed light.
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According to a Durham University release, the newly detected black hole is the first ever found using gravitational lensing. A paper about the discovery is published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery,” said James Nightingale, a physicist at Durham University, in the university release.
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The team identified the black hole by modeling the different pathways light might take through the universe, depending on the presence of black holes of varying mass. They then compared the computer data with images of the cosmos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, they found a match.