A rare 'ultramassive' black hole, 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, is lurking in the cosmos:
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 thousand 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.
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.
[...] 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.
[...] "Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies," Nightingale added. "This approach could let us detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time."
A brief video explaining the process
Journal Reference:
James. W. Nightingale, Russell J. Smith, Qiuhan He, et al., Abell 1201: Detection of an Ultramassive Black Hole in a Strong Gravitational Lens, arXiv:2303.15514 [astro-ph.GA], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.15514
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday March 31, @04:09PM (4 children)
is what hip astronomers say when they're properly pissed off.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday March 31, @04:20PM (3 children)
And when they have a target for their wrath: "That's not a black hole, that's yo momma!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday March 31, @05:57PM (2 children)
Yo momma's hole so
black, African American, negroid.....sorry... where was I?:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31, @06:04PM
You were heading to a dark place...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 31, @07:56PM
... that Vantablack looked at it and said, "I'm blind!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday March 31, @04:10PM
As I understand the article, and I spent at least 20 seconds skimming it, its 10.37 billion lightyears away, lets round that to 10 billion years old.
It weighs 40 billion solar masses (again, rounded). So figure gains 4 solar masses per year.
Now your average american is gaining like 50 pounds a decade of fat (thank you HFCS and the low fat diet), so that's about 5 pounds per year per person.
Figure the sun weighs 5e30 pounds to one sig fig, so assuming linear growth and spherical cows etc the black hole is gaining mass at the same rate as about 4e30 Americans, which is a lot.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Friday March 31, @05:07PM (4 children)
This "observation" is based on a number of theories and mathematical models, a house of cards, each of which must be true and accurate for this to be the case.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31, @05:44PM (2 children)
Thank you - came here for this.
This is the sketchiest of evidence - a possible solution of an ill-posed mathematical problem on par with x+y=10, therefore x=10 and y=0.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday March 31, @06:00PM (1 child)
So, same thing?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, @12:05AM
Well, we've moved on from angels on the head of a pin so that's progress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, @03:13AM
No kidding. And has anyone ever SEEN a dinosaur? No. It's ALL a house of cards and we should all just chill and enjoy the concentric crystal spheres we are blessed to get to see go around the Earth.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday March 31, @05:10PM (1 child)
It's just a Kardashev scale type IV civilization hiding one of their boundary outposts galaxies from more powerful adversaries.
Now, let's speculate more about hyper-operations on Kardashev scale metric... How about those civs who can create universes at will?
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 01, @03:05AM
It's a 10 billion years old observation, right? We are supposed to roughly double in what? 7 - 15 - 30 years? So they are way way WAY bigger than the universe or I call them suckers.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Tork on Friday March 31, @05:26PM (2 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday April 01, @10:27AM
Thank you. Here's some more [soylentnews.org] for ya!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Saturday April 01, @10:37AM
"Yo momma's so stupid, she thinks spaghettification happens in a kitchen!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Saturday April 01, @07:32AM (1 child)
Asuming that this is correct, it seems that they have discovered several thousand galaxies' worth of matter, literally hidden away from sight in one spot.
How many such ultramassive black holes would need to exist, in order to do away with dark matter?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, @01:01PM
I don't believe these kind of black holes help at all to explain things at the galaxy level, such as their stellar distributions and how they rotate.