Black holes up to 50,000 million soles – Diario Hoy (Argentina)

Scientists calculated the maximum size that can achieve these space monsters that are located in the center of galaxies

The vast majority of galaxies that astronomers observe in the sky with their telescopes have at their core a supermassive black hole, ie, with millions of times the mass of the sun. A true “space beast” that devours everything around it, but at the same time holds together and in order to hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy to which they belong. For example, in the center of our Milky Way, sleeps Sagittarius A, a black hole with an area equivalent to four million suns mass. But it is not the largest of the observed.

At the heart of other galaxies have been discovered and true “monsters” with hundreds, even billions of times the Sun’s mass. For example, one of the higher in the center of the galaxy NGC 1277, 220 million light years, has about 17,000 million solar masses.

But how far can a black hole grow? A team of researchers from Britain’s University of Leicester has just discovered that could grow to 50,000 million solar masses before losing forever the disks of dust and gas around them and that serve as support.

The gas can form rings lose energy and fall toward the black hole, feeding and making it bigger, but these drives are also often very unstable and tend to fragment and form new stars.

The study suggests who, after losing the disc, the black hole would grow. The only way to grow above that limit would be 50,000 million soles hole capture the stars to pass nearby and the swallow, or merged with another black hole, joining the mass of both.

It is possible that we could see one of these “super monster” with an alternative method. It is possible to detect otherwise. For example, watching how the rays of light from other galaxies are bent when passing by (what is known as gravitational lensing). Or maybe, in the future, identifying the “gravitational waves” that predicts the General Theory of Relativity, they would occur during the merger of black holes.