"After a hearty lunch, let your neighbor have dinner …"
It will be cleaner than Gargantua from Interstellar! The Hubble Space Observatory has managed to photograph the largest black hole in the universe. This "sleeping bridge" is located in some 300 million light years from the Earth - on a universal scale, alas, this is not so much. Astronomers managed to find a rather dangerous and even ominous "neighbor" …
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released images of this supermassive black hole. According to astronomers, this "sleeping giant", located in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4889 at a distance of 300 million light years from Earth, is one of the largest in the universe. Despite its impressive size, the black hole still behaves quite calmly.
However, astronomers believe that the external calmness of the object suggests that it harbors a terrible secret. The fact is that a few years ago, having received the first images of NGC 4889, scientists estimated its mass at 9.8 billion solar masses. However, new images have helped estimate that its mass is actually about 21 billion times the mass of the Sun.
“The event horizon of this black hole, that is, the surface, upon hitting which even light cannot leave its gravitational grasp, has a diameter of about 130 billion kilometers. This is 15 times the diameter of Neptune's orbit. For comparison, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way has a mass of about four million solar masses and an event horizon equal to 1/5 of the orbit of Mercury, - says the ESA website
Scientists believe that at the moment the black hole "fell asleep" after the feast and stopped absorbing stars and cosmic dust. Now they freely and calmly revolve around the giant. However, how long the galactic calm will last is unknown. According to astronomers, the images obtained will help increase the amount of knowledge about mysterious objects formed in the early days of the existence of the Universe.
The main thing is that this "monster" also sleeps further …