In science fiction films never misses a black hole, a singularity, something that can resolve the plot perhaps by making our heroes go back in time. But black holes really exist, and just yesterday one of gigantic, frightening dimensions was discovered: 17 billion times the size of our Sun.
It was found out Chung Pei Ma, of the University of California-Berkeley, astronomer and head of the studio Survey that examines galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe.
Fortunately, this is a black hole 200 million light years from us, in one area of the universe sparsely populated. Thanks to observations made by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers were able to identify this black hole in quite a galaxy isolated, NGC 1600.
“When two galaxies merge, their central black holes merge stabilize in the nucleus of the new galaxy and orbit one around the other." So far, the largest black holes have been found in very large galaxy clusters, and also for this reason it's about a unique discovery: never yes a hole was discovered black of similar size in an area with these characteristics.
Chung-Pei But does not exclude that there may be many "cosmic monsters". more numerous than expected and scattered everywhere: who knows what the consequences of this discovery could be.
