Ginormous Black Hole Discovered In The 'Cosmic Backwaters'
BERKELEY (CBS SF) -- Ginormous! Scientists have discovered a huge, near record-breaking black hole at the center of a massive galaxy in a remote part of our universe.
The "supersized" black hole weighs 17 billion times the mass of our sun and lies in the center an isolated elliptical galaxy dubbed NGC1600. Researchers found it using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii. News of the discovery was published in the April 6 issue of the journal Nature.
The black hole is located 200 million light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. Astronomer and lead discoverer Chung-Pei Ma of University of California-Berkeley, calls that part of the universe a "cosmic backwater," with only 20 or so galaxies, making this huge black hole a most unlikely discovery.
Ma heads the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe. She and her colleagues wonder whether these gargantuan black holes are more common than they thought.
"There are quite a few galaxies the size of NGC 1600 that reside in average-size galaxy groups," says Ma. "We estimate that these smaller groups are about 50 times more abundant than spectacular galaxy clusters like the Coma cluster. So the question now is, 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?' Maybe there are more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains."
The largest black hole found to date weighs 21 billion suns. Ma calls this one, weighing in at a close 17 billion, a "sleeping giant." As to how it got so enormous, it could have merged with other black holes long, long ago. Ma speculates the supersized hole must have had a huge appetite.
"To become this massive, the black hole would have had a very voracious phase during which it devoured lots of gas," Ma said.
That may explain why its galaxy is so sparsely populated. The black hole gobbled up everything in the neighborhood!
CBSSF.com writer, producer Jan Mabry is also executive producer and host of The Bronze Report. She lives in Northern California. Follow her on Twitter @janmabr.
