Astronomers have found a truly giant black hole that might be the most massive ever detected. This incredible black hole weighs about 36 billion times more than our Sun. To understand how huge that is, it’s around 10,000 times heavier than the black hole in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy.

The giant black hole is located inside a huge galaxy called the Cosmic Horseshoe, about 5 billion light-years away from Earth. This galaxy is so large that its gravity bends light from another, more distant galaxy into a ring shape, known as an Einstein ring. That’s why it’s called the Cosmic Horseshoe.

How scientists found it

The black hole was discovered using a new method that combines two scientific techniques:

  1. Gravitational lensing – the bending of light caused by a massive object.
  2. Stellar kinematics – studying the movement of stars around the black hole.

"This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive," said Professor Thomas Collett from the University of Portsmouth, who led the study.

The scientists could measure the black hole’s mass more accurately than usual because they had two pieces of evidence:

  • Its strong gravity bends the light from background galaxies.
  • The stars near it move extremely fast – about 400 kilometres per second.

Usually, black hole sizes are measured indirectly and have a lot of uncertainty, but this time the results are much more reliable.

A sleeping giant with big scientific importance

The black hole is described as "dormant", meaning it is not currently pulling in large amounts of matter or shining brightly like a quasar. Its presence is known only because of its powerful gravity. Carlos Melo from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil said that this method of finding black holes helps scientists detect "hidden" black holes that are not actively feeding.

This discovery is important because it shows the connection between galaxies and the black holes at their centres. Larger galaxies usually have larger black holes. The Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy is a "fossil group" galaxy, meaning it was formed when many massive galaxies merged together, and their central black holes combined into one supermassive black hole.

For comparison, the Milky Way’s black hole is only about four million solar masses, tiny compared to this one.

The scientists believe this method can be used with future telescopes, like the Euclid space telescope, to find many more ultramassive black holes and learn how they shape the universe.

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