Heaviest Black Hole Yet Could Swallow Our Entire Solar System [Space]

The black hole inside the nearby galaxy M87 weighs in at 6.6 billion suns, making it the local universe’s heavyweight champ. It’s large enough to swallow our solar system in one gulp.

” That’s the largest black hole inside the nearby universe,” said astronomer Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin in a press conference today here at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

The behemoth’s bulk, plus the undeniable fact that it lives just 50 million light-years away, makes M87 the appropriate candidate for future efforts to take an immediate image of a black hole’s event horizon for the first time.

” With regards to the biggest galaxies, it is in our backyard,” Gebhardt said. ” Being so near to this kind of massive black hole allows us a remarkable chance to check what happens around a black hole.”

At nearly 6 trillion times the mass of the sun, M87 is probably the most massive galaxy within the Milky Way’s cosmic neighborhood. Astronomers expected it to host a correspondingly huge black hole, but probably the most commonly accepted estimates – based on measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope – found the black hole weighed just 3 billion solar masses, give or take a billion.

But although Hubble ” has taken the lead in relation to black hole measures, it could’t do the most important ones,” Gebhardt said.

To pin down the monstrous black hole’s mass, Gebhardt and his colleagues used the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii to measure the speeds of stars zipping past the galactic center.

Using a way called adaptive optics , by which astronomers shine a laser on the sky and use that point of light to subtract out the celebrities’ twinkling, Gebhardt’s team was in a position to measure the velocities of stars within about 2 light-years of M87′s center using the Gemini telescope. The scientists also took data with a telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

The closer stars got to the heart of the galaxy, the speedier they moved, indicating that an enormous hunk of mass lurks at the heart to speed stars up. Gebhardt and associates used supercomputer models to calculate the black hole’s true heft: 6.6 billion suns, give or take 0.25 billion. For comparison, the black hole at the guts of the Milky Way is a trifling 4 million solar masses.

Most of that mass probably came from gas and stars the black hole has devoured over the millennia. But the trajectories of the celebs orbiting the black hole suggest that the solo monster that exists today is the made from two smaller black holes merging into one .

It probably took a number of hundred such mergers to build the beast in M87, said Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski, who was not thinking about the brand new work. Inside the same press conference, Djorgovski announced 16 new black hole pairs with the intention to probably merge inside the following few million years.

Big black holes also have big event horizons, the point at which a black hole’s gravity is so great even light can’t escape. The black hole in M87′s event horizon is ready 12 billion miles across, 3 times the dimensions of Pluto’s orbit.

” This black hole could swallow our solar system whole,” Gebhardt said.

That extensive event horizon would cast a gloomy shadow on the galactic dust behind it. Future observations with a world network of telescopes watching wavelengths of light smaller than a millimeter could potentially take a picture of that shadow, proving once and for all that black holes exist.

” We don’t know whether black holes are black holes,” Gebhardt said. ” To truly determine whether an object is a black hole, you want to have some form of proof of the event horizon. That doesn’t exist yet. To have an object where we’d be capable to image it, it’s remarkably important.”

Image: An artist’s rendition of what the black hole’s shadow might seem like. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook

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This post is tagged: american astronomical society, gemini north telescope, hubble space telescope, mcdonald observatory, observatory in texas, university of texas at austin