One of the biggest black holeswhich has a mass more than 30 billion times that of the Sun, was discovered by a team of astronomers using a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing”.

A team led by Durham University in the UK used this phenomenon, where the gravitational field of a galaxy in the foreground refracts light from a more distant object and magnifies it.

He also used university supercomputer simulations and ultra-high-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to closely study how light from a black hole bends inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth.

Thus, astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole, first detected using this method, in which the team simulates light passing through the universe hundreds of thousands of times.

“This black hole, about 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the largest ever discovered and is at the upper limit of how big we think black holes can theoretically get. So this is an extremely exciting discovery,” says lead author James Nightingale from the Department of Physics at the University of Durham.

He adds that gravitational lensing “makes it possible to study inactive black holes, which is not currently possible in distant galaxies. This approach could allow us to detect many more black holes outside of our local universe and show how they have evolved in cosmic time.”

The results of the study are published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Source: RES-IPE

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