Scientists have found many truly massive black holes in the cosmos, some of which weigh in at millions of billions of times the mass of our sun. These monsters lurk at the heart of galaxies like the Milky Way and M87 , but smaller stellar-mass black holes can be anyplace. Astronomers have spotted one of these black holes in our galactic backyard, but it’s a bit heftier than it ought to be.
The mystery started when a team led by Jifeng Liu, deputy director-general of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, spotted a star called LB-1 a mere 13,800 light-years away. The team used China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) to identify the star. While many black holes produce detectably x-ray or gamma signals, Liu’s team used LAMOST to hunt for inactive black holes with stars in stable orbits.
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You Cannot Conceive of the Hugeness of This Black Hole
How big? Among black holes whose masses scientists can directly infer based on the motion of their host galaxies' stars, it's the biggest. It's 40 billion times the mass of the Sun big—that's around 2.5 percent the mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
It's 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 paperclips, if that's how your mind works.
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"We actually don't know how big black holes can be," Jens Thomas, one of the study's authors from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, told Gizmodo.
Record-setting ultra-massive black hole found at heart of galaxy cluster – Astronomy Now
A monster black hole with 40 billion times the mass of the Sun – a new record – has been identified at the heart of a heavy-weight galaxy anchoring the Abell 85 galactic cluster some 700 million light years from Earth.
"There are only a few dozen direct mass measurements of supermassive black holes, and never before has it been attempted at such a distance," said Jens Thomas, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the University Observatory Munich. "But we already had some idea of the size of the black bole in this particular galaxy, so we tried it."
Supermassive Black Hole Triggers Star Formation in Multiple Galaxies | Astronomy | Sci-News.com
Enormous black holes usually affect their surroundings through the so-called 'negative feedback' — in other words, suppressing the formation of new stars. This can occur when the black hole's jets inject so much energy into the hot gas of a galaxy, or a galaxy cluster, that the gas can't cool down enough to make large numbers of stars.
This composite image shows the surroundings of a supermassive black hole that is triggering star formation across the longest distance ever seen; as hot gas swirls around the black hole, it emits large amounts of X-rays that Chandra detects; the black hole is also the source of radio-wave emission from a jet of high-energy particles — previously detected by scientists with the VLA — that stretches about a million light-years. Image credit: NASA / CXC / INAF / R.
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How there could be a black hole in our outer solar system - Business Insider
Narrator: Now, before you freak out, you should know that our planet isn't about to get sucked up and reappear in another galaxy. If there is a black hole, it's at least 20 times farther from Earth than the furthest planet, Neptune, in a distant region of our solar system called the extended Kuiper Belt. The belt is home to billions of icy objects, like comets and asteroids. And in 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown noticed that some of them have highly unusual orbits.
Rare Black Hole Spotted: It Triggers Star Formation | Asgardia - The Space Nation
Black holes, regions of spacetime that let nothing escape because of their strong gravitational pull, usually affect their surroundings through negative feedback, suppressing new star formation. However, in a newly discovered group of galaxies, astronomers spotted the opposite effect: a supermassive black hole enhancing star formation. Their findings are detailed in Astronomy & Astrophysics
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Most of the time, a black hole’s jets send so much energy into the galaxy cluster that the gas cannot cool down enough to make large numbers of stars. The newly found galaxy cluster, discovered using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory , is affected by the positive feedback of the black hole – triggering star formation even at a distance of a million light-years.
Astronomers discover the biggest ever black hole and it's terrifying | Metro News
Think of the fragile beauty of Earth, its lovely inhabitants and all the other wonders of our beautiful solar system
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But that's what popped into our minds when we heard that astronomers have identified the heaviest black hole in the whole of the known universe.
The beast sits in a galaxy called Holm 15A at the heart of a cluster of other star systems called Abell 85.
Blowtorch jets from a black hole drive starbirth
Unraveling this mystery required the combined power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory near Socorro, New Mexico.
The VLA radio data reveals jets blasting out from the vicinity of the central black hole. These jets inflated bubbles in the hot gas that are detected in X-rays by Chandra. Hubble resolves bright blue filaments of newborn stars in cavities between the hot jet and gas clouds. As the black hole has grown more massive and more powerful, its influence has been increasing.
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