A team of researchers from Durham University in the UK has announced the discovery of an ultra-massive black hole estimated to be more than 300 billion times the mass of our sun, located in the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster about 2.7 billion light-years away from Earth.
This black hole, one of the largest ever discovered, is described in numbers that are almost unimaginable to humans. It has a mass that is more than 5000 times greater than the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*.
Black holes are categorized according to their mass compared to that of our sun, with ultra-massive black holes being more than tens of millions of times greater than the sun’s mass and stellar-mass black holes being more than three times greater. In particular, there are black holes in the universe that exceed human imagination, with masses of more than 10 billion times that of our sun being referred to as “ultra-massive black holes”.
This black hole was discovered using the gravitational lensing effect and supercomputer simulations, which have captured the image of the galaxy’s light bending and magnifying as it passes through the gravitational field of the black hole. Scientists can use the gravitational lensing effect to observe distant celestial bodies up to 10-20 times brighter than would otherwise be possible.
The Durham University research team captured the image of the galaxy’s light bending and magnifying through gravitational lensing using the Hubble Space Telescope and ran supercomputer simulations hundreds of thousands of times to confirm the existence of this ultra-massive black hole, estimated to be 300 billion times the mass of our sun.
Dr. James Nightingale, who led the research, said, “An ultra-massive black hole of 300 billion times the mass of our sun is one of the largest ever discovered, and it’s at the upper limit of how big we think black holes can get, so it’s a very exciting discovery.”