Max Plank Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics | 2019 Dec 03
Astronomers discover the heaviest black hole in the nearby universe with 40 billion solar masses
In space, black holes appear in different sizes and masses. The record is now held by a specimen in the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies, where an ultra-massive black hole with 40 billion times the mass of our Sun sits in the middle of the central galaxy Holm 15A. Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the University Observatory Munich discovered this by evaluating photometric data from the Wendelstein Observatory as well as new spectral observations with the Very Large Telescope.
Even though the central galaxy of the cluster Abell 85 has the enormous visible mass of about 2 trillion (1012) solar masses in stars, the centre of the galaxy is extremely diffuse and faint. This is why a joint group of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the University Observatory Munich (USM) got interested in the galaxy. This central diffuse region in the galaxy is almost as large as the Large Magellanic Cloud, and this was a suspicious clue for the presence of a black hole with a very high mass.
The Abell 85 cluster of galaxies, which consists of more than 500 individual galaxies, is at a distance of 700 million lightyears from Earth, twice the distance for previous direct black hole mass measurements. ...
The new data obtained at the USM Wendelstein observatory of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and with the MUSE instrument at the VLT allowed the team to perform a mass estimate based directly on the stellar motions around the core of the galaxy. With a mass of 40 billion solar masses, this is the most massive black hole known today in the local universe. ...
A 40-billion solar mass black hole in the extreme core of Holm 15A, the central galaxy of Abell 85 ~ K. Mehrgan et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1907.10608 > 24 Jul 2019 (v1), 01 Dec 2019 (v2)