Onken said in a recent ANU press release, what they found was rather surprising:Īlready, the team had inklings that J2157 contained a rapidly-growing SMBH that consumed stars in the central region of its galaxy on a regular basis. Onken and the team relied on data from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to constrain the distance and mass of this SMBH at the core of J2157. This was a strong possibility, given that light J2157 is visible 12.5 billion light-years from Earth, and therefor has to traverse a huge distance in space and time to reach us. What’s more, they were able to rule out the possibility that its luminosity was the result of gravitational lensing, where the presence of intervening galaxies and other massive objects were responsible for magnifying J2157’s brightness. That particular study was led by Christian Wolf, a member of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), who also participated in this latest study.Īs they indicated at the time, J2157 is the brightest quasar observed in the known Universe to date, which they attributed to the presence of an SMBH at its center. The same team was responsible for discovering J2157, which they did back in 2018, using data from the Gaia observatory, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope, and the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this stunning infrared image of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, where the black hole Sagitarrius A resides. He was joined by researchers from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) and the Center for Gravitational Astrophysics (CGA) at ANU, as well as the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Steward Observatory. Onken – the operations manager of the SkyMapper telescope. The team’s study, which recently appeared in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was led by Dr. Since that time, astronomers have been hunting for the largest SMBH they can find, in the hopes that can see just how massive these things get! And thanks to new research led by astronomers from the Australian National University, the latest undisputed heavy-weight contender has been found! With roughly 34 billion times the mass of our Sun, this SMBH (J2157) is the fastest-growing black hole and largest quasar observed to date.
![blackhole swallows blackhole blackhole swallows blackhole](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1d/5a/da/1d5ada410c1e50b158feb334dd46c80d.jpg)
A decade later, astronomers discovered that an SMBH existed at the center of the Milky Way ( Sagitarrius A*) and by the 1990s, it became clear that most large galaxies in the Universe are likely to have one.
![blackhole swallows blackhole blackhole swallows blackhole](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6d/c0/8a/6dc08a29b5100537b2b1a565f9a1401a.jpg)
In the 1960s, astronomers began theorizing that there might be black holes in the Universe that are so massive – supermassive black holes (SMBHs) – they could power the nuclei of active galaxies (aka.