A coronal loop and resultant coronal rain on the sun, with Earth shown to scale.
(Image credit: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory/Emily Mason)
Black holes are some of the most mysterious objects in the universe. Yet scientists can learn plenty about black holes by examining their environments, the conditions their intense gravity generates, and the jets of matter they blast out at near light speed.
Here are the most impressive, extraordinary and shocking black hole stories of 2023.
- One of the biggest supermassive black holes
- Supermassive black hole seeds in the early universe
- 3. Supermassive black hole merger close to Earth
In March, researchers revealed that they had found what may be one of the most massive black holes ever discovered. The cosmic titan sits at the heart of the elliptical galaxy Abell 1201 BCG, located 2.73 billion light-years from Earth, and the galaxy itself is in a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 1201.
The Abel 1201 BCG black hole is believed to have a mass equivalent to 32.7 billion suns and was discovered through the effect of its gravitational influence on space.
“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,” study leader James Nightingale, a physicist at Durham University in the U.K., said in a statement.
This illustration shows a black hole forming directly from a massive cloud of gas and dust. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble)
For many years, scientists have pondered how supermassive black holes reach such tremendous sizes. This is particularly challenging when supermassive black holes with millions or billions of times the mass of the sun are discovered in the early epoch of the universe, when they would not have had time to feed on matter or even merge with other black holes enough to reach such titanic masses.
“It’s like seeing a family walking down the street, and they have two 6-foot teenagers, but they also have with them a 6-foot tall toddler,” John Reagan, a research fellow at Maynooth University who was not involved in the research, told Space.com.. ”
In August, astronomers discovered evidence of how this process may get a head start, finding “heavy seeds” of black holes with masses around 40 million times that of the sun in the universe just 400 million years after it began. These so-called outsize black hole galaxies are believed to form directly from massive clouds of gas and dust, rather than from dying stars, saving billions of years on the path to supermassive status.
In October, astronomers discovered a supermassive black hole binary system in the aftermath of two merging galaxies. » …
