Two black holes break size record
Could teach scientists how galaxies form
LOS ANGELES – Astrophysicists scanning the heavens have clocked a new cosmological record: the two biggest black holes ever detected – one about 10 billion times the mass of our sun and the second as much as twice that mass.
To be described in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature, these behemoth black holes are nearly double the size of the previous record holder and – strangely – are far more massive than they should be given the size of the galaxies they reside within.
For that reason, they stand to teach scientists much about how galaxies form and grow, astronomers said.
One of the finds, which were made using telescopes in Hawaii, Texas and in space, sits 320 million light years away in a huge elliptical galaxy within the Leo galaxy cluster. It contains a mass equivalent to 9.7 billion suns.
The second resides 336 million light years away at the center of a galaxy within the Coma galaxy cluster, in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices. It may be far more massive than the first – in the neighborhood of 20 billion solar masses.
The excitement at the find goes beyond the two black holes’ record-breaking size and the weirdness of entities so massive even light cannot escape their pull.
“Black holes are not just curiosities,” said Michele Cappellari, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study and wrote a commentary accompanying the report. “They’re really a part of the theory of how we think galaxies form.”
Astronomers are fairly certain that every galaxy – our own included – has a supermassive black hole at its center. These black holes’ existence was proposed four decades ago to account for the high-energy bursts of radiation, known as quasars, from very distant and ancient galaxies.
In recent years, the search for supermassive black holes has heated up and scientists have thus far uncovered more than five dozen of the cosmic behemoths.
The two newly discovered black holes dwarf the recent former record-holder, a heavyweight of 6.3 billion solar masses that sits in the M87 galaxy, about 50 million light years from Earth.