Record Breaking Black Holes

The black hole discovered in the galaxy NGC 3842 dwarfs our Solar System (inset).

Pete Marenfeld

Astronomers have discovered the two most massive black holes known in the Universe. Tipping the scale with masses on the order of 10 billion times that of the Sun, these gravitational monsters could represent a missing link: the first known remnants of the brightest quasars that lit the cosmos only a billion or so years after the Big Bang.

The findings, published in Nature, also suggest that there is a difference in the way the largest supermassive black holes reached their formidable size relative to their somewhat smaller cousins. Supermassive black holes formed early in the history of the Universe, by gorging on gas and stars in the cores of developing galaxies. They are thought to reside in most if not all of the massive galaxies astronomers can observe today, but they cannot be seen directly, as light cannot escape the gravitational field of a black hole.

Chung-Pei Ma, a cosmologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues went hunting for the monsters by measuring the velocities of stars moving closely around the centres of large galaxies. Because the velocities of the stars are related to the mass of the body they orbit, the technique offers an indirect way to ‘weigh’ the supermassive black hole lurking in the cores of other galaxies. The team restricted their observation to galaxies that are both large and embedded in galaxy clusters. In theory, supermassive black holes there could grow to enormous size by consuming gas and stars provided by other galaxies in the cluster.

“One may view these galaxy clusters as archeological sites, where ancient history left its fingerprints for us to discover,” notes cosmologist Avi Loeb of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not part of the study. Using instruments on the Keck II and Gemini North telescopes atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, the astronomers found that a cluster galaxy called NGC 3842 houses a black hole with a mass equivalent to 9.7 billion Suns. Another galaxy, NGC 4889, which lies at the centre of another cluster, has a black hole with an estimated mass of about 20 billion Suns, although it could be as large as 37 billion. (The previous record holder, a black hole at the centre of the nearby galaxy M87, has a mass of 6.7 billion Suns, some members of Ma’s team reported in the Astrophysical Journal on 10 March.

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