Astronomers expect to find giant black holes like these in large galaxies within dense clusters of galaxies. “I hate to call that one puny, but it has only 4 million solar masses, and we found one that is 17 billion solar masses”, says Chung-Pei Ma, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley who led the research in the Nature study. In comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, named Sagittarius A, is about 4 million time the mass of the sun. “Within the group, NGC 1600 is by far the most brilliant member and outshines other members by at least three times, an indication that NGC 1600 may have cannibalized its former neighboring galaxies and their central black holes in its youth”.
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“We don’t know right now if NGC 1600 is the tip of an iceberg, or a rare find, perhaps as a result of an unusually voracious phase during its youth”, she added.
For the Berkeley astronomers it was like finding a skyscraper in the middle of a cornfield.
Until now the biggest supermassive black holes have been found in the core of very large galaxies in parts of the universe packed with other large galaxies. In the meantime, the MASSIVE Survey will continue, hopefully offering more evidence that supermassive black holes are indeed everywhere. The black region in the center represents the black hole’s event horizon, where no light can escape the massive object’s gravitational grip.
Much less is known about the origins of the supermassive variety. The current record holder weighs 21 billion suns and is located in the Coma galaxy cluster that consists of over 1,000 galaxies.
What’s more, a black hole of this size wasn’t supposed to be in the area where it was discovered.
“Probably all of these galaxies harbor black holes in their centers”. “We couldn’t quite tell how big this hurricane was, this black hole was, but the hurricane was so big that we already started to feel the wind using this coarser data”.
Study researchers hope that studying the black hole can help them get some clues about lives and deaths of the galaxies.
ANALYSIS: Milky Way’s Second Most Massive Black Hole Found?
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of worldwide cooperation between ESA and NASA.
That scoured core of the galaxy also struck Gebhardt. The stellar orbits around the center of NGC 1600 indicate the latter, which “may be support for a binary black hole formed by a merger”. GMOS spectroscopically dissected the light from the core of the galaxy and allowed the team to discover the extreme mass of the black hole.
The new findings suggest Thomas and other astronomers would be well-served to expand their search for extra-large black holes. A lack of stars close to the galactic center distinguishes massive galaxies from standard elliptical galaxies, which are brightest at the core.
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Ma’s co-authors are Jens Thomas of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany; former UC Berkeley doctoral student Nicholas McConnell and John Blakeslee of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, British Columbia; former Miller Visiting Professor Jenny Greene of Princeton University; and Ryan Janish of UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics.
