The mass of each of the black holes is about 10 billion solar masses, the previous record was the black hole in the center of M87 - only 6.3 billion solar masses
Astronomers from the University of California at Berkeley have discovered the largest black holes known to date - two monsters with a mass equal to 10 billion suns each, threatening to swallow everything, including light, in an area 5 times the size of our solar system.
The black holes are at the center of two galaxies more than 300 million light-years from Earth, and may be the dark remnants of several bright galaxies known as quasars that populated the early universe.
"In the early universe, there were a lot of quasars - active nuclei of galaxies, some of which received their energy from black holes with a mass of 10 billion suns," says Chang-fei Ma, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "These two supermassive black holes closely resemble young quasars and may be the missing link between quasars and the supermassive black holes we see today."
Black holes are a compressed form of matter that produces gravitational forces so great that even light cannot escape from them. While exploding stars, called supernovae, can leave behind a black hole the mass of a single star like our Sun, a supermassive black hole grows from the merger of other black holes or through the capture of a large amount of stars and gas.
"These massive black holes shed light on the question of how black holes and their surrounding galaxies coalesced since the beginning of the universe," says Berkeley research student Nicholas McConnell, lead author of the paper to be published in the December 8 issue of the journal Nature. In addition to McConnell and Mehme, researchers from the Universities of Toronto, Texas and Michigan, as well as the National Optical Observatory in Arizona, are partners in the article.
So far, 63 supermassive black holes have been discovered in the cores of nearby galaxies. The largest of them, for three decades, had a mass of 6.3 billion solar masses, in the center of the nearby galaxy M87.
One of the black holes now discovered is 9.7 billion solar masses in the elliptical galaxy NGC 3842, the largest galaxy in the Leo galaxy cluster, 320 million light-years away in the direction of the Leo group. The second black hole is similar in size or more massive, and it is in the center of the galaxy NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster - about 336 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the Veronica Hair group, or Coma Berenices in Hebrew.
According to McConnell, the black hole's event horizon is 200 times the Earth's distance from the Sun, or 5 times the orbit of Pluto. Beyond the event horizon, each black hole has a gravitational influence up to 4,000 light years in diameter.
By comparison, these black holes are 2,500 times more massive than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, whose event horizon is about one-fifth the orbit of the planet Hema.
These massive black holes have remained hidden from us until now because they lived in retirement and kept quiet, said Meh. During their active lives, about 10 billion years ago, they cleaned up their entire neighborhood by ingesting huge amounts of gas and dust. The gas that survived became the stars that have surrounded them peacefully ever since. According to Ma, these monstrous black holes and the respective monstrous galaxies containing trillions of stars, settled in the center of the galaxy clusters.
What, a theoretical astrophysicist decided to examine these massive black holes in relatively close clusters of elliptical galaxies as a result of a computer simulation of the run of colliding galaxies.
Astronomers believe that many, if not all, galaxies contain a black hole at the center, with the larger the galaxy, the larger and more massive the black hole. The largest black holes have been found in elliptical galaxies thought to be the result of the merger of two spiral galaxies. Ma found that the merger of the elliptical galaxies themselves could produce an elliptical galaxy as well as a black hole whose mass could reach 10 billion solar masses. These black holes can grow even larger by consuming the gas left over from the merger.
"A multiple merger of several galaxies is one way to build these beasts," said Mah.
To search for the supermassive black holes, a team of observatory astronomers including James Graham, a professor of astronomy at Berkeley and the University of Tortano, and Carl Gebhardt, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. Gebhart is the one who discovered the black hole that held the record so far in the galaxy M87.
The researchers used the Gemini telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the McDonald Observatory in Texas. McConnell and Ma obtained the detailed spectrum of the flickering light from the centers of several massive elliptical galaxies, each of which was the brightest in its cluster. So far they have analyzed the peripheral velocity of stars in two galaxies and calculated the central mass in the range of a quasar. Such a large mass with a volume of several hundreds of light years led astronomers to the conclusion that these masses originate from massive black holes. "If all these masses were stars, we should have seen their light" said Ma.
Modeling the massive galaxies required powerful supercomputers at the Advanced Computing Center in Texas.
"For astronomers, finding these supermassive black holes is like meeting 3-meter-tall people, how they grew to be so tall," Meh said. "This rare find helps us to understand whether these black holes were inherited from tall parents, or whether they ate a lot of spinach."
For the announcement of the University of Berkeley
More of the topic in Hayadan:
22 תגובות
As a general rule, you are right - the rate of star production is high at the edge of the galaxy and relatively low in the center. The center contains mainly old and small stars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_galaxy#Galactic_bulge) while the arms contain young stars. Our sun has not been a star since the beginning of the galaxy and is actually a star that is a second generation of stars, meaning that its gas has already starred in a large star that died in the past - this is what enables the existence of metals and complex materials made of hydrogen and helium which are essential for life.
However, this does not teach about who preceded who, since the stars are formed from gas that has been in the galaxy for a long time and was usually already in the stars in the past.
The answer to the question of who preceded whom is as far as I know undecided since the very formation of the super massive black holes is not clear. What is clear is that at least part of their mass was not originally there but was absorbed from the galaxy's environment and to the eye - it seems that in the early stages of the universe almost all galaxies were active (AGN), i.e. absorbed material from their environment.
For those
Know the ages of the stars of the galaxy. Check, on Google for example, and give us your conclusions.
Good night for now
Sabdarmish Yehuda
To Judah:
I don't know how old the suns closer to the center of our galaxy are. Maybe they are more "old"? My knowledge on the subject is very little. Do you already know the age of the solar systems for milk?
Avi Blizovsky!
You wrote-
"Black holes are a compressed form of matter that produces gravitational forces so great that even light cannot escape from them"
This is a fairly common mistake.
The more massive black holes are, the lower their density.
Black holes on the scale in the article are thousands of times less dense than our atmosphere!
But the end of the sentence is correct-
Despite the low density, they create an event horizon around them.
pleasantness
It seems to me that, if you are right, the old stars should be in the center of the galaxy. How does this work with the fact that our sun is five (billion) years old and really not young, and yet we will be far from the central sphere around the black hole in our dear galaxy?
Good Day
Sabdarmish Yehuda
"Astronomers believe that many, if not all, galaxies contain a black hole at the center, with the larger the galaxy, the larger and more massive the black hole"
Maybe it's the opposite? Maybe galaxies are formed because there is a black hole whose enormous gravity "sucks" star systems into it? Maybe the black hole was before the galaxy around it?
Regarding my response from 10:08, on second thought Mikkel is indeed right and I am wrong
Even if there is dust from the direction of the black hole, it will probably not hide the black hole. Any gravitational disturbance of a star in the vicinity of the black hole will only move them away from the line of sight of the black hole and the artist's drawing is apparently accurate.
apologetic
(:))
Good night
Sabdarmish Yehuda
Quick Recovery
The Earth, the Solar System. Everything is on the side of a gaping hole from which you can see the horizon on which the galaxies and black holes are seen as the universe is seen from here. To understand this, try to see the universe from there. This is the event horizon here in it, on which we are from black faces. The one that is applied to the material, that is applied by the space, the darkness itself. This means that space itself must be thought of as material, as material. Although it is not understood and to the same extent it does not contradict its being matter. After all, if it is just a vacuum we would be nothing, it must be trapped in some kind of bottle, from which what was there before was taken out into space, before it became stellar matter. Which means that the universe has a physical limit and therefore there is also what is outside the physical limit and this is usually another universe or other infinite universes just like galaxies and stars and black holes. Now you can start thinking for yourself. Genius is not acquired. She is born and the one who understands will understand. Thanks. While I am just another one who is not developed and does not understand that one and one are equal, there is no such thing and not two. Two,, and please note,, is also one.
Point: If there is a finger of God then there is a God? Or is it just his finger? From my experience, not every triple finger is proof of God's existence, but when Hapoel beats Maccabi it is.
Indeed, there was a reference to some New Age movie and I deleted it because it's not my job to send people to waste time on nonsense. But if that was the only problem I would leave the link.
He also used the ability to link to a website under an alias, to push an advertisement to a commercial website selling ovens. This was the only purpose of the response, the film, which is also garbage in itself, was only the excuse.
Mr. Ben Ner, in every galaxy there are black holes that will eventually swallow all the matter, so even the galaxies are moving away, yet the black holes remain in the galaxy.
The explanation for the first reactions: in the distant past, a few minutes after the post, a reaction was created by one anonymous person, who tried to carry out a coup on the site. Not long after, when things cooled down a bit, I wrote the second comment. In the first nuclear response, someone brought a link with a video of someone I suspected to be crazy. Then I wrote what I wrote, which created a paradox and basically threw the system out of balance.
The events that unfolded as a result of my response are not fully known and remain under a veil of heavy fog and cumulative uncertainty, but the prevailing claim is that God himself intervened in the site's code and destroyed the first message as if it had never existed (but those who know Han can point to my second response, which first became God's finger, a memory of that ancient first reaction).
to Max Power
As far as I know, the opposite explanation is the accepted one today.
The universe is expanding (in the sense of expanding) at an accelerated rate (inflation)
And the future is…..a huge and cold universe, where every cluster of galaxies will remain isolated and isolated
Clusters of galaxies that once (this time of the future of course) were "neighbors" to him.
A disturbing question, will the end of the universe happen when all matter is swallowed into black holes?
Do the first 3 comments belong here or did they get here due to a strange technical glitch?
Yehuda:
You are wrong.
If there are no stars on the way between the observer and the black hole it will look like in the drawing.
Gravitational dusting exists and its traces can also be seen in the "smeared" spots of light in the vicinity of the black hole, but the distortion created by dusting cannot cause the light of a nearby star to reach our eyes from the direction of the black hole.
The event horizon is the area closest to the center of the hole from which light can reach an observer outside the hole.
Lihuda, I'm really not an expert in the field, but it seems to me that Einstein predicted vortices of twisting space under strong gravitational conditions, so it is possible that light does appear to have angular momentum.
A giant black hole will swallow all the stars in its vicinity, but on the other hand it will dim the light of the stars next to it, therefore, I don't think a black hole will look like it did in the work of the artist because the gravitational dimming is supposed to tilt the light of the stars around it so that it doesn't show a black spot.
If its surroundings look like this, the explanation must be different from a black hole.
Good Day
Sabdarmish Yehuda
AR-
10x
point. So in other words you claim that there are 7 billion crazy people? At least one of them has an idea..
LD: before he reaches all the AA pseudo science points, he brings up interesting ideas about the energy of the vacuum, and explains it all in very precise to a point of sounding scientific fashion
But then he gets into the psychobabble crap like all those AA
I have enough of those in 3 seasons worth of this rubbish
I think they all try their best but fail to remain in the confinements of pure science simply because these are not men of science, simply the league of Fon Daniken the believer..
Still it always sparks the never ending debate. I'd stick to science who takes us to the here and now
Does it make sense to you to listen to any crazy person with an idea? There are 7 billion people.