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Scientists are wondering if there is an upper size limit to black holes inside or outside the observable universe. In December 2019, astronomers announced the discovery of one of the most perfect macroscopic objects, the largest hard disk in the cosmos, the largest black hole ever measured in the nearby universe at the center of an elliptical galaxy in the galactic cluster Abel 85 40. billions of times the mass of the sun, or roughly the size of our solar system, which is home to two-thirds of the mass of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
“Only the elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time”
Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, for whom NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory was named, described black holes that the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time, “which inspired astrophysicists to wondering how big these paradoxical objects, these “Gates of Hell” that have no memory, but are said to contain the first memories of the universe, could they become?
“A Quantum Paradox” – Black Holes, nature’s largest hard drive
Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the University Observatory discovered the monster by evaluating photometric data and new spectral observations with the Very Large Telescope. The galaxy is Holm 15A, a huge elliptical galaxy at the center of a cluster of galaxies called Abell 85, which consists of more than 500 individual galaxies, at a distance of 700 million light years from Earth, double the distance for the previous one. direct black hole mass measurements.
“There are only a few dozen direct measurements of the mass of supermassive black holes, and never before has it been attempted at such a distance,” explains scientist MPE Jens Thomas, who led the study. “But we already had an idea of the size of the black hole in this particular galaxy, so we tried.” The team captured a snapshot of Holm 15A’s stars orbiting the galaxy’s central black hole and created a model to help them calculate the black hole’s mass.
“Just imagining such a huge black hole is fantastic,” said Thomas, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and one of the study’s authors.
In the distant universe about 10 billion light years away, the very bright quasar TON 618 hides – an even more massive quasar than Holm 15A estimated to have a mass of 66 billion times that of our sun. Giant black holes like TON 618 could shed light on the nature of a significant fraction of the mysterious dark matter. These “stupendously large black holes” (SLABs) in galactic nuclei exist in theory and may have been seeded by primordial black holes, suggests Florian Kuhnel who holds the chair of cosmology at the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics. This largest known black hole in the observable universe leads to conjectures that even larger ones exist within or beyond the observable universe, and ask if there is an upper limit to their size.
In crowded clusters of galaxies, these huge elliptical galaxies like Holm 15A can collide and merge again to form an even larger elliptical galaxy. Their central black holes also combine and form larger black holes, galactic monsters that lift huge amounts of nearby stars to the edges of the newly formed galaxy, leaving its faint, sterile, or “animated” center.
The study authors found that Holm 15A, formed from another merger of two already huge elliptical galaxies that probably formed from the combination of eight smaller spiral galaxies over the course of billions of years. Pairs of spiral galaxies form elliptical galaxies, pairs of elliptical ones form elliptical cored galaxies and a pair of cored galaxies formed Holm 15A. This series of mergers also created the black hole at the center, a monster about the size of our solar system but with a mass of 40 billion suns.
M87’s Gigantic Black Hole – “Unveils the Light of the Whole Universe”
Holm 15A is similar to elliptical galaxy M87, the largest and most massive galaxy in the neighboring universe, thought to have been formed by the merger of about 100 smaller galaxies. New observations in July 2018 with ESO’s Very Large Telescope revealed that the giant elliptical galaxy M87 has engulfed an entire medium-sized galaxy over the past billion years. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team theorized that black hole M87 grew to its enormous size by merging with many other black holes.
“A Galaxy Fell Through It” – Creation of EHT’s M87 Black Hole Monster
“A medium-sized galaxy has fallen through the center of M87 and, as a result of massive tidal gravitational forces, its stars are now scattered over a region that is 100 times larger than the original galaxy!” said Ortwin Gerhard, head of the dynamics group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics on the monstrous elliptical galaxy hosting the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system captured for the first time ever by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on 10 April 2019.
The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Arxiv.org and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
Image credits: Shutterstock license, top of page. Composite image Abel 85, 85.X-RAYS (NASA / CXC / SAO / A.VIKHLININ ET AL.); OPTICAL (SDSS)
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