Gigantic black hole could be just the 'tip of an iceberg'

New black hole discovery prompts new theory.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI))

published 7 April 2016

Nothing makes you feel quite as insignificant as the fact that there are supermassive black holes out there snacking on stars and weighing, oh, 17 billion times the weight of our sun. One such supermassive black hole, discovered recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, might indicate that there are actually whole crowds of such supermassive black holes in the universe — or at least far more than we once believed.

Usually the biggest black holes, with masses of about 10 billion times the weight of our sun, are discovered at the heart of very large galaxies in crowded regions of the universe. But the gargantuan supermassive black hole found by NASA actually exists in a quiet, remote section of space:

"The newly discovered supersized black hole resides in the center of a massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1600, located in a cosmic backwater, a small grouping of 20 or so galaxies," said lead discoverer Chung-Pei Ma, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe. While finding a gigantic black hole in a massive galaxy in a crowded area of the universe is to be expected — like running across a skyscraper in Manhattan — it seemed less likely they could be found in the universe's small towns."There are quite a few galaxies the size of NGC 1600 that reside in average-size galaxy groups," Ma said. "We estimate that these smaller groups are about 50 times more abundant than spectacular galaxy clusters like the Coma cluster. So the question now is, 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?' Maybe there are more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains." [NASA]

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox