Astronomers used a combination of gravitational lensing and simulations to detect the cosmic behemoth.
A team of astronomers used a novel method to discover one of the biggest black holes ever discovered, a press statement reveals.
The team, led by scientists at Durham University, UK, used a combination of gravitational lensing and supercomputer simulations to gain new insight into the cosmic giant located hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth.Seeking black holes with supercomputer simulations The new discovery constitutes the first time a black hole has been discovered using the supercomputer-enabled technique. The novel method sees light simulated traveling through the Universe hundreds of thousands of times. Each simulation features a different mass black hole, each of which changes the trajectory of the light traveling toward Earth.
The method works by finding the correct match for the light seen in real images captured, in this case, by the Hubble Space Telescope. In other words, when the team simulated light passing through an ultramassive black hole, the path taken by the light from the distant galaxy matched the path observed in real life. For their simulations, the team used Durham University's DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer facilities.
"This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery," lead author Dr. James Nightingale from the Department of Physics at Durham University said in
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