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Old 04-12-2019, 04:17 PM
gary
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Cool 40 billion solar-mass black hole discovered at heart of Abell 85 central galaxy

A December 3rd 2019 press release from the Max Plank Institute
reports on the most massive black hole ever recorded.

It's an ultra-massive black hole with 40 billion times the mass of our Sun
and sits in the middle of the central galaxy in the Abell 85 galaxy cluster,
Holm 15A.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Max Planck Institute
Even though the central galaxy of the cluster Abell 85 has the enormous visible mass of about 2 trillion 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. “There are only a few dozen direct mass measurements of supermassive black holes, and never before has it been attempted at such a distance,” explains MPE scientist Jens Thomas, who led the study. “But we already had some idea of the size of the Black Hole in this particular galaxy, so we tried it.”

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.
Press release here :-
http://www.mpe.mpg.de/7387190/news-p...22019?c=260780
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