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| Edited By: |Source: ANI |Updated: Mar 11, 2018, 04:25 AM IST
Astronomers have discovered two biggest black holes known to exist, at the centres of two galaxies more than 300 million light years from Earth and with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns.
According to the researchers at University of California, Berkeley, these black holes, which are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system, may be the dark remnants of some of the very bright galaxies, called quasars, that populated the early universe.
"In the early universe, there were lots of quasars or active galactic nuclei, and some were expected to be powered by black holes as big as 10 billion solar masses or more," said Chung-Pei Ma, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy.
"These two new supermassive black holes are similar in mass to young quasars, and may be the missing link between quasars and the supermassive black holes we see today."
While exploding stars, called supernovas, can leave behind black holes the mass of a single star like the sun, supermassive black holes have presumably grown from the merger of other black holes or by capturing huge numbers of stars and massive amounts of gas.
"These black holes may shed light on how black holes and their surrounding galaxies have nurtured each other since the early universe," said Nicholas McConnell, first author of the paper.
According to McConnell, these black holes have an event horizon—the "abandon all hope" edge from which not even light can escape—that is 200 times the orbit of Earth, or five times the orbit of Pluto.
Beyond the event horizon, each black hole has a gravitational influence that would extend over a sphere 4,000 light years across.
“For comparison, these black holes are 2,500 times as massive as the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, whose event horizon is one fifth the orbit of Mercury,” McConnell said.
According to another researcher, Ma, these 10 billion solar mass black holes have remained hidden until now, presumably because they are living in quiet retirement.
During their active quasar days some 10 billion years ago, they cleared out the neighbourhood by swallowing vast quantities of gas and dust. The surviving gas became stars that have since orbited peacefully.
Ma has said that these monster black holes, and their equally monster galaxies that likely contain a trillion stars, settled into obscurity at the centre of galaxy clusters.
Ma revealed that these black holes can grow even larger by consuming gas left over from a merger.
"Multiple mergers are one way to build up these behemoths," Ma said.
The study will be published in the British journal Nature.
