The newly discovered supermassive black hole reportedly holds a mass of nearly a billion Suns.
Galaxies Trapped Around Supermassive Black Hole
Nothing can escape from a black hole, which is the powerful cosmic monster with a strong gravitational pull that attracts nearly everything around its region. But for the very first time, a study published in the journal ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’ suggests that astronomers have discovered six galaxies trapped around a supermassive black hole. The newly discovered supermassive black hole reportedly holds a mass of nearly a billion Suns.
The study indicates that all the six galaxies that have been found were trapped due to a cosmic web-like structure fueled through gas. This gas also feeds the black hole and makes it more massive. Astronomers say that together, the trapped galaxies stretch up to three hundred times greater than the size of our the Milky Way.
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According to the latest study, this is the first time galaxies have been found folded so close to each other around a supermassive black hole. Moreover, these types of black holes are known to be the largest in terms of mass and can be millions of times more massive than the Sun.
The study has found that this entanglement of galaxies is located about 0.9 billion light-years away from the planet Earth. The latest discovery was made possible through the help of European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is based in Chile. Giant halos from large regions of invisible matter are believed to have attracted huge amounts of gas in the early universe and hence the gas and the invisible dark matter could very well have combined to form the web-like structures where both the galaxies and black holes are believed to could have evolved.
“The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments,” said Marco Mignoli, lead author of the study and astronomer from the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy. Researchers also believe that the galaxies around the black hole are extremely bright, and hence, more such clusters could be around.
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