Astronomers have found a suppermassive black hole forming from the collision of three spiral galaxies from a distant region of the cosmos, 1.8 million years away from Earth.
According to Mail Online the black hole has a mass of 3.8 billion suns. The huge space object dwarfs our Milky Way and anything in our galactic neighborhood.
Australian astronomers have found the supermassive space object by chance, when they where testing a new telescope from Australia's scientific body CSIRO in Murchison. Scientists believe that the new discovery could provide more insight into how supermassive black holes and galaxies form and the impact they have on the universe.
The black hole is located at the center of a distant galaxy called IRAS 20100-4156. Australian researchers describe the object in a paper published online in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team was able to capture measurements of radio waves emitted by the gas at the center of the stellar cluster IRAS 20100-4156. Astrophysicists hope that by studying, black holes can find new insight into how stars and galaxies form. By using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), scientists could compare two perspectives of the same region of the universe.
A closer analysis of the swirling gases revealed that they were moving at a speed of around 600 km per second. According to scientists, this is twice as fast as it would have been expected. The astronomers explained that this is an indication of the scale of gravity exerted by the supermassive black hole, which allows an estimation of its mass.
Lisa Harvey-Smith, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, told ABC News that scientists can estimate how massive the black hole is by its very fast motion of the gas. The stuff that is swirling around it can be considered as a direct measurement of the mass of the black hole.
