NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected a supermassive black hole approximately 300 million light-years away in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, which is located in the Coma Cluster, as outlined in a press release.
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According to NASA, every galaxy has a supermassive black hole with “masses greater than than 1 million suns combined” at the center. WFIRST is set to launch in the mid-2020 range and will be placed in orbit at Earth-sun L2 about a million miles from Earth and opposite the sun.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has started work on a new telescope with a view 100 times bigger than that of Hubble Space Telescope that may help unravel the mysteries of dark matter and advance the search for alien life. The photo of the supermassive black hole appears placid and ethereal at first glance, and even though the black hole is dormant, it’s broken all types of records, according to the Hubble website. Scientists have noted that stars near the space giant are very stable, leading them to reason that there isn’t enough nearby galactic debris left to swallow.
During that active period, NGC 4889 would have classified as a quasar (quasi-stellar radio source) thanks to the black hole’s emissions of up to a thousand times more energy than our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers do not think the space behemoth will become active again unless some stray matter gets too close and gets captured by the space vacuum’s intense gravity. But the black hole is now in dormant mode because there isn’t any more sustenance stored in the orbiting accretion disk.
The environment within the galaxy is now so peaceful that stars are forming from its remaining gas and orbiting undisturbed around the black hole.
At one point, the black hole was fueling itself on a process called hot accretion. But scientists were able to measure NGC 4889’s black hole by using the velocity of the stars moving around it and found it to be one of the largest known black holes.
“If a black hole with the same mass as the sun were to replace the sun, Earth would not fall in”.
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Although it is impossible to directly observe a black hole – as light cannot escape its gravitational pull – its mass can be indirectly determined.
