Astronomers have discovered the largest black hole in the universe, which has a mass equal to 30 billion Suns. The black hole is so gigantic that astronomers are calling it an ‘ultramassive blackhole’ instead of the usual term ‘supermassive blackhole.’ The black hole was detected at the centre of the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster, hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth, Space.com reported.
The findings of the ultramassive blackhole were published by the Royal Astronomical Society. The team stated that the blackhole was discovered using the technique called gravitational lensing.
In the technique, scientists use a galaxy which is nearer to another, as Nature’s magnifying glass to observe. The use of gravity plays an important role as it bends the light around extremely massive objects. The method acts like a natural magnifying lens, which is used to observe extremely distant objects that human-made telescopes can't view.
This is the first black hole to be discovered using the gravitational lensing technique.
Astronomers discovered that the galaxy was centred around the monster black hole, while using gravitational lensing.
"Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies. 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," James Nightingale, an astrophysicist at Durham University in the UK and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
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The Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the size of the ultramassive black hole after it analysed the magnification of the foreground object.
As per the published study, the black hole is not very active despite its enormous size. It was noted that the black hole wasn’t swallowing much material and not emitting strong X-ray radiation. Such less active black holes are nearly impossible to observe using other methods.
