It has a mass that is equivalent to the incredible number of 36 billion in alone, the gigantic black hole now identified at 5 billion light years from the earth, in the center of the ‘horseshoe galaxy cosmicò, also supermassiccia: to have a comparison term, the one at the center of our galaxy has a mass equal to only 4.15 million alone. This makes him return without a doubt among the 10 largest ever detected, and perhaps the most massive ever.
This is what the study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society led by the Federal University of the Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, which not only confirmed the existence of a black hole in the center of this galaxy, as the astronomers had been suspected for some time, but also managed to measure it despite being “falling asleep, is also devoting the surrounding subject. Normally, black holes reveal their presence thanks to their activity, which produces for example X -rays, easy to detect.
The dormant ones, on the other hand, can hide more easily, but the researchers led by Carlos Melo-Carneiro have been able to exploit a very particular effect, the so-called ‘Einstein ring of Einstein’: the cosmic horse galaxy acts as a gravitational lens, bending the light coming from another galaxy that is exactly behind it and drawing a ring, which in this case resembles a horse iron.
In addition to this, the discovery of stars which, influenced by the very strong gravitational attraction of the enormous black hole, travel at a speed of about 400 kilometers per second, was also to help the authors of the study. “Its identification was based exclusively on its immense gravitational attraction and on the effect it has on the surrounding environment,” says Melo-Carneiro: “What is particularly exciting is that this method allows us to detect and measure the mass of these ultra-abstain black holes hidden in the universe, even when they are completely silent”.