Posted on 08/07/2025 12:46:49 PM PDT by Red Badger
The Cosmic Horseshoe is a monster within a monster.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI
If size doesn’t matter, then explain this: The Cosmic Horseshoe is a gravitationally lensed system with the foreground galaxy being one of the heaviest in the known universe, hundreds of times our own galaxy. It is so heavy that it warps space-time to such a degree that the light of a background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe. Inside that galaxy sits an equally impressive supermassive black hole. According to the latest study, this could be the biggest ever found.
There have been several claims in the last decade about the most massive black holes. They are all in the several tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun and are found in the core of equally humongous galaxies. The uncertainty in their masses is equally big, in the tens of billions of solar masses. But not for this one.
The ultramassive black hole at the center of the Cosmic Horseshoe is 36.3 billion times the mass of the Sun, with an uncertainty of about 6 billion solar masses. This claim has used a tried and tested method, which has not been used on all the other “most massive” candidates, and the team is pretty confident about it.
“This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive,” co-author Professor Thomas Collett, from the University of Portsmouth, said in a statement.
“Most of the other black hole mass measurements are indirect and have quite large uncertainties, so we really don't know for sure which is biggest. However, we’ve got much more certainty about the mass of this black hole thanks to our new method.”
Most supermassive black hole masses are estimated when the black hole is active, usually based on the accretion. This object is not active, so researchers used a method usually for more local supermassive black holes, not one 5 billion light-years away.
They looked at how the black hole’s gravity warped the light that passes near the black hole. They also looked at the speed of stars in the inner region. They are moving very quickly, at almost 400 kilometers (250 miles) per second. These measurements gave them a more confident value of the black hole mass.
“This discovery was made for a 'dormant' black hole – one that isn’t actively accreting material at the time of observation. Its detection relied purely on its immense gravitational pull and the effect it has on its surroundings,” added lead author Carlos Melo of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.
“What is particularly exciting is that this method allows us to detect and measure the mass of these hidden ultramassive black holes across the universe, even when they are completely silent.”
The work also provides new insights into the relationship between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. These are believed to grow together. The Cosmic Horseshoe is also a Fossil Group galaxy, a galaxy at the end of its evolution, having consumed all its bright companions.
“It is likely that all of the supermassive black holes that were originally in the companion galaxies have also now merged to form the ultramassive black hole that we have detected,” said Professor Collett. “So we're seeing the end state of galaxy formation and the end state of black hole formation.”
The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Big Beautiful Black Hole Ping!.................
Tax dollars and lost socks.
The universe is larger than we can ever imagine.
The Big Beautiful Black Hole at the end of the Universe!
I thought this was about 0bama.
Not Stacey Abrams?..............
The universe is much more violent than we can ever imagine. Great violence separated by vast uninhabitable vacuum.
We are blessed to have this one habitable Earth to live on.
you would think that you could do something like that as an energy source and you’d have energy forever
use something like that , not do. Stupid speech-to-text
I have a drawer full of single socks. How does that even happen?
Since I believe the “Big Bang” was when Lucifer (Satan), who was in charge of the universe, fell and the whole universe turned dark, maybe those black holes may be some kind of leftover spiritual darkness of some kind.
I think one could most likely connect “black holes”, whatever they are, with the “Prince of Darkness”.
Not a vacuum. Filled with energy fields.
All that we think of as matter is composed of energy fields.
E=MC2
There are probably others that are billions of times bigger than that one.
That’s beautiful. Thanks.
Ukraine is bigger black hole than this one.
We’ve finally found something that sucks more than the New York Times.
Call it hell’s little island.
Also old-style beer can and bottle openers, until it was discovered they were the larval stage of coat hangers.
I guess Muse was right, there IS a supermassive black hole!
Lethal radiation
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