A supermassive black hole has been discovered, lying at the core of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147. This is something commonly seen, as many galaxies harbor enormous black holes at their center. However, this specific black hole, should not exist, astronomers claim. The mysterious black hole was discovered just recently by NASA’s powerful Hubble telescope, and it defies the existing theories about the universe.
The black hole, which is approximately 250 million times heavier than our Sun, lies at a distance of about 140 million light-years from Earth. Around the black hole has also been found a thin ‘accretion disc,’ full of debris and gas rapidly traveling back and forth around the edge. The information is noted in the article with the findings, published on Thursday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Hubble Space Telescope Discovered A Supermassive Black Hole That Should Not Exist
The black hole was quite peculiar in that its gravitational pull was not absorbing the disk made of material, which was moving at 10 percent the speed of light, the findings note. Lead author of the article depicting the discovery, Stefano Bianchi said that it is the same kind of disk we see in objects that are 1,000 or 100,000 times more bright. The predictions of current patterns for gas movement in very vague active galaxies definitely failed, he added.
The discovery is an exciting glance at a disk found very close to a black hole, so close that the velocities and the force of the gravitational pull are impacting how we see the photons of light, Bianchi explained in the paper. By analyzing the disk through blocking out starlight, astronomers could better observe the process occurring close to the black hole’s edge. The research team said they plan to study more galaxies with the powerful Hubble Space Telescope in the following years to discover similar disks of material.
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