Astronomers Have Found A Black Hole 300 Times Bigger Than Our Milky Way Galaxy

Another major revelation in the cosmic universe has been made by scientists, courtesy ESO¡¯s Very Large Telescope (VLT). This one, extends to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way and might just be the key to solve one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.

Astronomers have discovered a total of six galaxies located around a supermassive black hole. The conglomerate is very young on the cosmic time scale, born even before the Universe was less than a billion years old. Current age of the universe, calculated since the Big Bang, is estimated to be 13.8 billion years.

Artist¡¯s impression of the web of the supermassive black hole (Image: ESO)

A release by ESO says that ¡°this is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang.¡± It explains the importance of the discovery as a better way of understanding how supermassive black holes (SMBH) grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. One such SMBH exists at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery supports the most widely followed hypothesis, that black holes grow rapidly within large, ¡°web-like¡± structures which have plenty of gas to fuel them.

¡°This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects ¡ª supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,¡± said Marco Mignoli, lead author of the new research now published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy.

The supermassive black hole

The new SMBH discovered by the astronomers is surrounded by several galaxies surrounding, all in a cosmic ¡°spider¡¯s web¡± of gas. ¡°The cosmic web filaments are like spider¡¯s web threads,¡± explains Mignoli.

¡°The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas ¡ª available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole ¡ª can flow along the filaments.¡±

The research by the scientists points out that the newly discovered black hole has a mass of one billion solar masses. It explains that the light coming from this large web-like structure that led to its discovery has travelled to us ¡°from a time when the Universe was only 0.9 billion years old.¡±

Solving an age-old mystery

ESO's Very Large Telescope (Image: ESO)

To date, astronomers have not been able to explain how in the early universe, enough fuel was available for such black holes to grow to such a massive size. The new discovery offers a possible explanation.

As per the finding, the ¡°spider¡¯s web¡± and the intertwined galaxies are responsible for it. These conglomerates are believed to contain enough gas to provide the fuel that the central black hole needs to quickly become a supermassive giant.

The question then arises, how did such large web-like structures form in the first place?

Astronomers believe that dark matter has something to do with this. Large regions of invisible dark matter are believed to attract large amounts of gas in the early Universe. Both the entities - gas and dark matter, then combine to form the web-like structures ¡°where galaxies and black holes can evolve.¡±

¡°Our finding lends support to the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos in large-scale structures, and that the absence of earlier detections of such structures was likely due to observational limitations,¡± says Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, a co-author on the study.