Monster Black Hole, What Scientists Are Not Telling You About This

A super massive black hole has been recently discovered by NASA scientists. Around 1.8 billion light-years away from Earth and with a mass of 3 billion times than the Sun, this supermassive black hole has been produced by 3 colliding spiral galaxies.

Called IRAS 20100-4156, the trio of spiral galaxies that formed the supermassive black hole at the centre of this collision was accidentally discovered during a test observation of the CSIRO's new telescope, according to a report on Science Alert.

Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith, an astrophysicist of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, said that the black hole is absolutely monstrous compared to the black hole found at the centre of our galaxy which is only four million solar masses.

As cited in a news article on ABC News, in Murchison Dr Harvey-Smith measured the spectrum of radio waves which was emitted by the maser during a test observation of the CSIRO's new radio telescope: the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP).

At first, Dr Harvey-Smith thought it was only an ordinary phenomenon; however, the researchers spotted something more interesting upon further checks with the Australia Telescope Compact Array telescope according to a news article on ABC News.

It was found out that the said maser was moving extremely fast, no less than six hundred kilometers per second around the center of the galaxy. This is twice as fast as previously thought. The gravity from the super massive black hole swirls the gas forming the maser.

"This very fast motion of the gas tells us about how massive the black hole is," Dr Harvey-Smith said. "The really exciting thing about this is it is a direct measurement of the mass of the black hole by stuff that's swirling around it," she said further.

A starburst is created by the formation of super massive black holes through the merging of galaxies. A starburst is where stars begin forming hundreds of times faster than they ever did before. This has enabled astrophysicists to be able to see the galaxy so many light years away.

Dr Harvey-Smith concluded that measuring mass the of supermassive black holes in different galaxies of different ages can definitely provide insights into how galaxies have evolved over the history of the universe.