Amazed astrophysicists peering at an image of NGC 1277—a galaxy located in the constellation Perseus about 220 million light-years away—are ready to tear up the textbooks concerning how galaxies are created.
What is causing the uproar? A black hole, one of the most mysterious objects in the cosmos. And it’s not just any black hole. This one is huge, it dominates, it’s a monster. Calling it a “giant black hole” doesn’t begin to describe it for the object is so big it’s 17 billion times as massive as our sun.
Stunned astronomers believe it dominates a whopping 59 percent of the entire mass of the distant galaxy.
The discovery, written about in a paper published in the journal Nature, illustrates why scientists are rocked by the data. The authors note: “Observations have shown that the mass of the black hole is typically 0.1 per cent of the mass of the stellar bulge of the galaxy. Until now, the galaxy with the largest known fraction of its mass in its central black hole (11 per cent) was the small galaxy NGC 4486B.”
Until now. The latest number crunching of the mammoth black hole tips galactic theory on its head and has astronomers scurrying to their computers.
Karl Gebhardt from the University of Texas, Austin is a member of the team that discovered the monster. He told ABCNews that, “This is a really oddball galaxy. “It’s almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.”
Another massive black hole
Not to be outdone, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) facility in Paranal, Chile made another momentous discovery. Touting their find as “The Biggest Black Hole Ever,” the scientists released photos and information about an exploding black hole—also known as a quasar—that dares anyone to find something bigger or more impressive:
“We have discovered the most energetic quasar outflow known to date. The rate that energy is carried away by this huge mass of material ejected at high speed from SDSS J1106+1939 is at least equivalent to two million million times the power output of the Sun. This is about 100 times higher than the total power output of the Milky Way galaxy—it’s a real monster of an outflow,” says team leader Nahum Arav (Virginia Tech, USA). “This is the first time that a quasar outflow has been measured to have the sort of very high energies that are predicted by theory.”
That teams research paper, “Major contributor to AGN feedback: VLT X-shooter observations of SIV BAL QSO outflows,” [PDF] will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
For a long time after their discovery, quasars mystified scientists. Now it’s known the highly energetic objects are super-massive black holes usually tucked into the center of disc galaxies. The intense light from a quasar is created during the process of the black hole sucking matter into it and throwing off huge quantities of radiation across the spectrum.
The blast of energy recorded by the ESO team is the biggest ever seen: an incredible two trillion times more energetic than our sun.
About the size of the find, businessinsider.com reports study researcher Nahum Arav, of Virgina Tech University, observed: “This is about 100 times higher than the total power output of the Milky Way galaxy—it’s a real monster of an outflow. This is the first time that a quasar outflow has been measured to have the sort of very high energies that are predicted by theory.”
Such observations and the new knowledge coming from them has encouraged astrophysicists to predict the first observation of gravitational waves is “imminent.” A new paper arguing this belief, “The imminent detection of gravitational waves from massive black-hole binaries with pulsar timing arrays,” is published on the Cornell University Library website.
