Mysterious black hole weighs 36 billion times more than the Sun

(Dan Tri) - Scientists have just confirmed the existence of a supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to 36 billion Suns, located 5 billion light years from Earth.

The newly discovered black hole could be the largest black hole ever known (Illustration: Getty).

Astronomers have discovered a giant black hole hidden in a giant galaxy. It has the mass of 36 billion suns, and could be the largest black hole ever found. The black hole appears to be about 5 billion light years away.

This object, located within the Cosmic Horseshoe star system, 5 billion light-years from Earth, features a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where light from a distant galaxy is strongly bent by the enormous gravity of the foreground galaxy, creating a near-perfect arc called the Einstein Belt.

Special detection method

What's special is that this black hole is in a dormant state, not sucking in massive amounts of matter and not emitting strong radiation like active black holes. This makes it harder to detect, because active black holes usually reveal their existence through X-ray radiation from their accretion disks.

To measure the mass, the team combined two methods: observing the gravitational lensing effect and measuring the velocity of stars near the galaxy's center, which move at speeds of up to 400 km/s.

When the two data sources matched, they confirmed that this was a real black hole, possessing enormous gravitational pull.

Map of stars and exoplanets within 25 light years of the Sun (Photo: Science Alert).

Clues to the evolution of the galaxy

According to scientists , the size of a supermassive black hole is often closely related to the size of its parent galaxy.

Specifically, when galaxies merge during evolution, matter is forced into the center, feeding the black hole. Some of the energy from active black holes turns into quasars, bright light sources that can heat and stir up gas in the galaxy, preventing the formation of new stars.

Notably, the galaxy containing Cosmic Horseshoe is a type of “fossil group”, the end product of a series of galaxy mergers in the past, when the companion galaxies disappeared and only a single galaxy remained.

Researchers believe that all the supermassive black holes from the companion galaxies merged, creating this “cosmic monster”.

There has been no research that allows us to see black holes (Photo: Getty).

Thanks to the gravitational lensing effect, light from the background galaxy is bent around the foreground galaxy containing the black hole, clearly demonstrating the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The discovery of Cosmic Horseshoe opens up two important research directions: clarifying the relationship between galaxy size and black hole mass, and understanding the process that makes a black hole so massive.

From an astronomical perspective, this is a rare opportunity to observe the final stages of galaxy formation and black hole evolution in the universe.

Source: https://dantri.com.vn/khoa-hoc/ho-den-bi-an-nang-gap-36-ty-lan-mat-troi-20250808074005774.htm