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Scientists Uncover The Largest Black Hole Ever Observed

Rada Mateescu

On the left, an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey shows Cygnus X-1, outlined in a red box. Cygnus X-1 is located near large active regions of star formation in the Milky Way, as seen in this image that spans some 700 light years across. An artist's illustration on the right depicts what astronomers think is happening within the Cygnus X-1 system. Cygnus X-1 is a so-called stellar-mass black hole, a class of black holes that comes from the collapse of a massive star. New studies with data from Chandra and several other telescopes have determined the black hole's spin, mass, and distance with unprecedented accuracy.

Scientists are not finished with mind-blowing block hole discoveries for the year 2019. It’s been just reported that Max Planck Institute’s Kianusch Mehrgan and more experts have found the largest black hole ever observed at the center of Holm 15A.

This is a galaxy which is located at about 700 million light-years away.

This is more than twice as largest as previously observed record-setter, Engadget reports.

It also has 40 billion times the mass of the Sun and 10,000 times the mass of the black hole at the core of the Milky Way.

The Very Large Telescope was used 

The team of experts has spotted the black hole using data from the Very Large Telescope array.

The same online publication mentioned above writes that there’s a massive amount of data from the Chile observatory and this helped the experts to map the structure of Holm 15A in details without precedent.

This has also helped experts run various simulations in order to explain the galaxy’s formation and its unusual faint center.

The black hole’s radius is enormous: 79OAU. This is so powerful and large that experts are thinking about two possibilities: that it has either swallowed up the closest stars or it tossed them towards the galaxy’s edge.

Engadget notes that this is not necessarily the largest black hole detected.

“That distinction goes to the quasar TON 618 — indirect studies suggest its black hole could be 66 billion times the Sun’s mass,” according to the reports.

These discoveries could expand out understanding regarding the scale of our universe.

Stephen Hawking’s theory on back holes 

Speaking of black holes, we recently reported that physicists have managed to confirm the predictions made by Stephen Hawking’s theory of black holes. They used a black hole that they created in their laboratory, says recent paper.

Experts have instead built a black hole analog with the help of a strange quantum material that’s called Bose-Einstein condensate. The point of no return is for sound rather than for light.

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