Supermassive Black Hole Found in Unlikely Cosmic Backwater
Source: Scientific American
Supermassive Black Hole Found in Unlikely Cosmic Backwater
Discovery of object 17 billion times sun's mass may
mean many more such monsters are out there
April 7, 2016
One of the biggest black holes ever found sits in a cosmic backwater, like a towering skyscraper in a small town.
Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole containing 17 billion times the mass of the sun—only slightly smaller than the heftiest known black hole, which weighs in at a maximum of 21 billion solar masses—at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600.
That's a surprise, because NGC 1600, which lies 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, belongs to an average-size galaxy group, and the monster black holes discovered to date tend to be found in dense clusters of galaxies. So researchers may have to rethink their ideas about where gigantic black holes reside, and how many of them might populate the universe, study team members said.
"The black hole is much bigger than we expected for the size of the galaxy or where this galaxy lives, the environment," said study co-author Chung-Pei Ma, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supermassive-black-hole-found-in-unlikely-cosmic-backwater/
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