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Largest black hole: 6.6 billion solar masses

Astronomers calculate the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 is 6.6 billion solar masses.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Weighing 6.6 billion solar masses, the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 is the most massive black hole for which a precise mass has been measured. Using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of astronomers calculated the black hole’s mass, which is vastly larger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, which is about 4 million solar masses.

Astronomer Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas, Austin, presented the results of the team’s research on Wednesday, January 12, at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. He said that the black hole’s event horizon, which is 20 billion km across, is four times larger than Neptune’s orbit and three times larger than Pluto’s orbit. In other words, the black hole “could swallow our solar system whole.”

Sonic Black Hole

Bose® SoundDock® Series II digital music system for iPod® - Black

Researches have created a sonic black hole in the lab. Sound goes in but can't escape.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Black holes get their name because they absorb all incoming light, and are so dense that none of that light can escape their event horizon. In a new study, scientists have created a sonic analogue of a black hole in the lab – that is, a sonic black hole in which sound waves rather than light waves are absorbed and cannot escape. The scientists hope that the short-lived sonic black hole could allow them to observe and study the elusive Hawking radiation that is predicted to be emitted by traditional black holes, which has so far been a very difficult task.

The scientists, Oren Lahav and coauthors from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, have published their study on the sonic black hole in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

The researchers created the sonic black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate made of 100,000 rubidium atoms slowed to their lowest quantum state in a magnetic trap. This cold cluster of atoms acts like a single, large quantum mechanical object. In order to transform this condensate into a sonic black hole, the scientists had to find a way to accelerate some of the condensate to supersonic speeds so that the condensate would contain some regions of supersonic flow and some regions of subsonic flow.

Supermassive Black Hole

(Credit: Reines, et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA)

A supermassive Black Hole has been discovered in a nearby dwarf galaxy.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2011) — The surprising discovery of a supermassive black hole in a small nearby galaxy has given astronomers a tantalizing look at how black holes and galaxies may have grown in the early history of the Universe. Finding a black hole a million times more massive than the Sun in a star-forming dwarf galaxy is a strong indication that supermassive black holes formed before the buildup of galaxies, the astronomers said.

The galaxy, called Henize 2-10, 30 million light-years from Earth, has been studied for years, and is forming stars very rapidly. Irregularly shaped and about 3,000 light-years across (compared to 100,000 for our own Milky Way), it resembles what scientists think were some of the first galaxies to form in the early Universe.