Supermassive black hole bigger than scientists thought was possible

KEELE, England, Sept. 24 (UPI) — Astronomers in England have discovered a supermassive black hole many times larger than should be possible.

In astrophysics, very few rules are hard and fast. There are mostly just loose parameters, theories and informed expectations — expectations that are constantly being subverted by newly discovered phenomena.

That’s what happened in England, where researchers at Keele University and the University of Central Lancashire had to throw their expectations out the window after measuring the impossibly large size of a black hole at the center of a newly discovered galaxy.

Using satellite data to ascertain the speed of the gas swirling around the black hole, and the nature of the light being emitted by the accreted gas, scientists were able to ascertain the gravitational pull — and thus the size — of the black hole at the center of the SAGE0536AGN galaxy.

The black hole is 350 million times more massive than our sun. Meanwhile, the galaxy measures 25 billion solar masses, seventy times the size of the black hole. It’s a ratio never before observed — a black hole 30 times larger than scientists expected, given the size of its galactic home.

“Galaxies have a vast mass, and so do the black holes in their cores,” Jacco van Loon, an astrophysicist at Keele University, said in a press release. “This one though is really too big for its boots — it simply shouldn’t be possible for it to be so large.”

Van Loon is the lead author of a new paper on the befuddling black hole, published this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The black hole’s growth has somehow managed to outpace the expansion of its home galaxy, but researchers aren’t sure whether the black hole’s growth was bolstered by an external force or if something retarded the growth of the galaxy.

Though the black hole is currently an oddball in the universe, Van Loon and his colleagues say the phenomena may simply represent a new class galaxies. To find out for sure, astronomers will just have to keep looking.