Ultramassive black hole

• Astronomers have discovered an ultramassive black hole using gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where a foreground object bends light from a distant object behind it.
• Researchers used supercomputer simulations to simulate light from a distant galaxy travelling through the Universe, each simulation had a black hole of a different mass.
• The path taken by the light in one simulation matched the path seen in actual images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, leading to the discovery of an ultramassive black hole in the foreground galaxy.
• The ultramassive black hole is over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun.

About Black Hole

• Black holes are regions of space-time where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them.
• They are formed when a massive star collapses in on itself at the end of its life, creating an incredibly dense object with a gravitational pull that is so strong that it warps space-time around it.
• Types of Black Holes:
  • Stellar Black Hole: It is formed by the collapse of a single massive star.
  • Intermediate Black Hole: Their masses are between 100 and 100,000 times that of the sun.
  • Supermassive Black Hole: Their masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the sun, found at the centres of most galaxies including our own Milky Way galaxy.
• Studying black holes can also help us understand the fundamental properties of space, time, and gravity.

Gravitational Lensing

• Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon where the path of light from a distant object is bent by the gravitational field of a massive object, such as a galaxy or a black hole.
• This bending of light can cause distant objects to appear distorted or magnified, depending on the alignment of the massive object and the observer.
• The effect of gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, and has since been observed and studied by astronomers.