Black holes 10b times size of sun found
Source: Agencies |
December 7, 2011, Wednesday
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SCIENTISTS have found the biggest black holes known to exist - each one 10 billion times the size of our sun.
A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of elliptical galaxies more than 300 million light years away - relatively close on the galactic scale.
"They are monstrous," Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma said. "We did not expect to find such massive black holes as they are more massive than indicated by their galaxy properties. They're extraordinary."
The previous black hole record-holder is as large as 6 billion suns.
In research released Monday by the journal Nature, the scientists suggest these black holes may be the leftovers of quasars that crammed the early universe. They are similar in mass to young quasars, they said.
The scientists used ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble Space Telescope and Texas supercomputers, observing stars near the black holes and measuring the stellar velocities to uncover these vast, invisible regions.
Black holes are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape. Some are formed by the collapse of a super-size star. It's uncertain how these two whoppers originated, said Nicholas McConnell, a Berkeley graduate student who is the study's lead author.
One of the newly detected black holes weighs 9.7 billion times the mass of the sun. The second, slightly farther from Earth, may be even bigger.
"If there is any bigger black hole," Ma said, "we should be able to find them in the next year or two."
A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of elliptical galaxies more than 300 million light years away - relatively close on the galactic scale.
"They are monstrous," Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma said. "We did not expect to find such massive black holes as they are more massive than indicated by their galaxy properties. They're extraordinary."
The previous black hole record-holder is as large as 6 billion suns.
In research released Monday by the journal Nature, the scientists suggest these black holes may be the leftovers of quasars that crammed the early universe. They are similar in mass to young quasars, they said.
The scientists used ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble Space Telescope and Texas supercomputers, observing stars near the black holes and measuring the stellar velocities to uncover these vast, invisible regions.
Black holes are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape. Some are formed by the collapse of a super-size star. It's uncertain how these two whoppers originated, said Nicholas McConnell, a Berkeley graduate student who is the study's lead author.
One of the newly detected black holes weighs 9.7 billion times the mass of the sun. The second, slightly farther from Earth, may be even bigger.
"If there is any bigger black hole," Ma said, "we should be able to find them in the next year or two."
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