Artist image of a black hole. The newly-discovered black holes are at the centres of two galaxies more than 300 million light years from Earth.
AP Photo/University of Warwick
A team of astronomers has news that will suck you in.
They’ve found two of the largest black holes to date. Each one is a monster with a mass equal to 10 billion suns. To compare, the previous record holder for more than three decades is as big as six billion suns.
The black holes are at the centres of two galaxies more than 300 million light years from Earth. They threaten to devour anything within a region five times the size of our solar system. A black hole is a region of space that has so much mass that no nearby object can escape its gravitational pull.
But the discovery is more than just an entry in
Guinness World Records, said James Graham, director of the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics.
“It’s putting together a bigger story, not just about our own galaxy, but galaxies throughout the universe and through cosmic time,” said Graham, a founding member of the team behind the discovery.
Led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the team aims to piece together a history of galaxy formation by looking at how galaxies and black holes evolve together.
Using telescopes, astronomers measured the strength of the gravitational field of each black hole; the stronger the gravity, the bigger the black hole.
“These are particularly exciting,” said Graham. “They’re even more massive than we expected to see based on previous work.”
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