Supermassive: Black hole billions of times larger than the Sun discovered

The mysteries of deep space have always interested humanity, especially since great thinkers understood the existence of gravity and heliocentrism.

However, it was mainly after the space race that humanity began to focus more and more efforts on understanding the Universe that surrounds us.

One of the great discoveries of this period was the existence of black holes. As many already know, they are extremely massive spheres that can capture even light, so that nothing is able to escape this singularity.

They were theorized by John Michell in 1784, but it was only with Einstein’s theory of relativity that it was possible to understand exactly how the event occurs.

We now know that black holes are formed by the death of a supermassive star. However, that is not the end of their growth.

This is because black holes can continue to grow for the rest of their lives, either by absorbing the matter around them or by merging with other black holes. This process ends up forming what is known as a supermassive black hole.

New supermassive black hole discovered

And it is precisely about these practically unimaginable singularities that we will talk about now. Last Wednesday (29), astronomer James Nightingale, together with his team, published an article in the magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the article, astronomers reveal the discovery of a supermassive black hole, which is the size of thirty billion suns. According to researchers from Durham University in the United Kingdom, this singularity is 2.7 billion light-years from Earth and was discovered thanks to gravitational lensing.

In turn, gravitational lenses are a very common phenomenon when it comes to black holes, as they distort even the light that surrounds them.

However, gravitational lenses are not exclusive to them. In reality, this is a phenomenon that affects the way we see objects with a lot of mass, that is, they distort the space around them. In this way, we see the image as a kind of “distorted lens”, hence the name.

And it was precisely because of this phenomenon that Nightingale and her colleagues were able to capture the presence of this new black hole. The proof came through images from the Hubble satellite and computer projections.

For comparison, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, has a mass of four million. Based on this, it is possible to understand a little about the almost unbelievable size of this new singularity.