Supermassive black holes, which weigh millions to billions of times more than our Sun, are believed to inhabit the heart of most, if not all, galaxies in the Universe. Such beasts are characterized by their extremely heavy masses, insatiable hunger, and unruly table manners. These gravitational monstrosities are mysterious and bewildering. But, the mystery became even more perplexing when a supermassive monster, weighing unbelievably 17 trillion soles–was trapped living in the heart of a strange little galaxy that is almost entirely a black hole!
“This is not at all what I was looking for. I was expecting to find really big black holes in really big galaxies,” said Dr. Remco van den Bosch, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, said on November 26, 2012 Science now. Dr. Van den Bosch is the lead author of the paper describing this incredible gravitational monstrosity.
In 1915 Albert Einstein General Theory of Relativity it predicted the presence of objects that possessed gravitational fields so strong that anything unluckily traveling too close to their gaping mouths would be gobbled up. However, the concept of real The existence of such gravitational monstrosities seemed so remote that Einstein himself dismissed the concept, but scientists now know that such beasts can and do. to do exists.
Stellar-mass black holes form when a very massive star violently collapses in the brilliant fireworks display of a supernova explosion, heralding the end of its life as a main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) star. After a stellar mass hole has been born, it can continue to gain weight by feeding on its surroundings. A supermassive hole is believed to be born when one of stellar mass gains weight by gobbling up stars and gas, as well as by merging with other black holes.
Astronomers have known for about a decade that perhaps every major galaxy in the Universe harbors a ravenous supermassive monster at its heart, sequestered there in sinister secrecy. Supermassive beasts can be at least as big as our entire Solar System. The black hole in our Milky Way gets its name Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius-a-star), and is a calm old beast, except when it has an occasional feeding frenzy and devours a hearty dollop of gas or stellar matter that has unfortunately floated too close to its maw. Sagittarius A* It weighs about 4 million times more than our Sun.
Supermassive black holes are widely believed to be subject to a standard correlation. That is, the heavier the galaxy’s central bulge of bright stars, the more massive the sinister resident beast. Basically, this indicates that the weight of a galaxy’s glowing bulge of stars is about a thousand times that of its central supermassive hole.
However, the small compact galaxy, NGC 1277, apparently marches to the beat of a different drum. The tiny galaxy, which lies approximately 250 million light-years from our planet, possesses a supermassive monster at its heart that makes up a whopping 14% of its total mass. Most other galaxies are thought to dutifully keep up with the “standard correlation” and host black holes amounting to a comparatively paltry 0.1% of their total mass.
“This is a really strange galaxy. It is almost entirely a black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy and black hole systems,” study team member Dr. Karl Gebbardt said in a statement. statement published on November 28, 2012. space.com. Gebbardt is at the University of Texas at Austin.
The study, published in the November 29, 2012 issue of the journal Naturediscovered that if this monster of a supermassive black hole were located at the center of our own Solar System, it would swallow all eight major planets and spread out about 10 times further than the dwarf planet Pluto and its icy type where they circle in the frigid and remote blackness of Kuiper belt.
NGC 1277 is a relatively small member of a cluster of galaxies located in the constellation Perseus. It also represents a type of galaxy that commonly inhabits clusters. This small galaxy with a big, dark heart is called lenticular galaxy, which means it’s a bewitching cross between a spiral not anymore elliptical galaxy. spirals they are giant pinwheels resplendent with stars, like our own Milky Way, and contain stellar populations of all ages. elliptical they are shaped like huge soccer balls and are home to mostly old red stars. As a elliptical, NGC 1277 it no longer produces stellar bursts of fiery baby stars, and hosts mostly only old stars. The youngest stars in the small galaxy are 8 billion years old, which means they are twice the age of our middle-aged Sun, which is approximately 4.56 billion years old. Yet like a lovely, pinwheel-shaped spiral, NGC 1277 It sports a glowing disk with a multitude of incandescent stars.
“Maybe this thing is a relic from long ago,” Dr. Van den Bosch continued to speculate on November 28, 2012. Science now. He went on to explain that supermassive holes ignited by fire quasars–which are especially active galactic nuclei (AGN) that inhabited the early Universe– roamed space shortly after the Big Bang. Perhaps, he went on to suggest, NGC 1277 it represents a case of arrested development, and began its galactic infancy as an immense black hole, but never managed to engulf a multitude of fiery stars. In other words, like Peter Pan, NGC 1277 “never grew up”! His sister galaxies, swarming with him in the perseus cluster, they may have selfishly taken for themselves the stars that would have allowed the poor little NGC 1277 to reach star-dazzled galactic adulthood.
NGC 1277 The supermassive monster could be considerably more massive than the currently identified second runner-up, which is estimated (although not confirmed) to weigh about 6 billion to 37 billion solar masses. This beast lives in the dark heart of the galaxy. NGC 4486Band occupies about 11% of that galaxy’s central bulge.
Dr. Van den Bosch said on November 28, 2012 space.com that his team discovered the monstrous black hole during a survey he was conducting to look for “the biggest black holes we could find.”
The astronomers carefully analyzed the light emanating from 700 galaxies, using the massive light-gathering telescope, the Hobby–Eberly telescopeat the University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. The team found that six of the galaxies under scrutiny had stars and other objects flying within them at staggering average speeds of more than 218 miles per second! galaxies, like NGC 1277, They were also small: just 9,784 light-years across or less. The team suspected that black holes were responsible for these measurements and used archival data from NGC 1277 of the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. That’s how they found out NGC 1277 big dark heart
Dr. Van den Bosch is curious as to whether these supermassive black holes only formed in the early Universe, or whether some formed later in its history. “It could be that this thing has been sitting around since the Big Bang and hasn’t done much since then. It could be a relic of what star formation and galaxy formation looked like at the time,” he commented on November 28, 2019. 2012 space.com.
The team is trying to find out if NGC 1277 it is one of a kind. However, as astronomer Dr. Chung-Pei Ma of the University of California at Berkeley noted on November 28, 2012 science now: “When you just have a very strange system, you can almost always come up with some theories. But if these galaxies form a class of their own, that would be pretty exciting.”