Scientists "Weigh" Black Hole, Find It Measures 660 Million Suns
How do you weigh a monster black hole estimated to be more massive than a million suns? Turn on the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array and point it to the cloud of dust of a nearby galaxy. Simple, Eh?
A team of scientists have done just that and have found a black hole housed in an elliptical galaxy 73 million light-years away to weighing as much as 660 million suns! Scientists determined the speed of orbiting gas around the galaxy in order to estimate the weight of the black hole within an error of just 10 percent. ALMA was used to measure radio signals from carbon monoxide molecules as these molecules emit signals that can be easily discerned.
"This observation demonstrates ALMA's powerful capability to determine the masses of supermassive black holes by resolving gas kinematics on small angular scales in galaxy nuclei," researches wrote in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The speed of the dust cloud orbiting the galaxy was found to be 1.1 million mph!
"The ubiquity of black holes is one indicator of the profound influence that they have on the formation of the galaxies in which they live," said one of the study's authors Andrew J. Baker.
"The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which is the biggest one in our own galaxy, is many thousands of light years away from us," he said. "We're not going to get sucked in."
A black hole is formed after a star's demise causes a severe implosion of matter under gravity, under set conditions including mass of the dying star. Once formed, a black hole does not let anything, including light, escape its gravitational pull. While hotly debated, most physicists accept that matter that crosses over the 'event horizon' of the black hole will tend to sucked into supermassive, infinitely dense but singular core of black hole.
