光弯曲现象探测300亿节气超大质量黑洞

一组天文学家利用一种称为引力透镜的现象发现了有史以来最大的黑洞之一。

光的曲线引力

由英国杜伦大学领导的团队使用引力透镜——前景星系弯曲并放大来自远处物体的光——DiRAC HPC 设施的超级计算机模拟使团队能够仔细研究黑洞如何弯曲光在数百英里外的星系中。距地球数百万光年。

该团队模拟了数十万次穿越宇宙的光，每次模拟都涉及不同的质量[{” attribute=””>black hole, changing light’s journey to Earth.

An artist’s impression of a black hole, where the black hole’s intense gravitational field distorts the space around it. This warps images of background light, lined up almost directly behind it, into distinct circular rings. This gravitational “lensing” effect offers an observation method to infer the presence of black holes and measure their mass, based on how significant the light bending is. The Hubble Space Telescope targets distant galaxies whose light passes very close to the centers of intervening fore-ground galaxies, which are expected to host supermassive black holes over a billion times the mass of the sun. Credit: ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey, Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org), N. Bartmann

30 billion times the mass of our Sun

When the researchers included an ultramassive black hole in one of their simulations, the path taken by the light from the faraway galaxy to reach Earth matched the path seen in real images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

What the team had found was an ultramassive black hole, an object over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, in the foreground galaxy – a scale rarely seen by astronomers.

This is the first black hole found using gravitational lensing and the findings were published today (March 29) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

一段视频展示了天文学家如何利用引力透镜在 20 亿光年外的星系中发现一个质量是太阳 300 亿倍的黑洞。 图片来源：达勒姆大学

回顾宇宙时间

我们所知道的大多数最大的黑洞都处于活跃状态，因为被拉到黑洞附近的物质会升温并以光、X 射线和其他辐射的形式释放能量。

引力透镜使得研究不活跃的黑洞成为可能，这在目前遥远的星系中是不可能的。 这种方法可以让天文学家探测到比之前认为的质量更大的不活跃黑洞，并研究它们是如何变得如此巨大的。

这一发现的故事始于 2004 年，当时杜伦大学的天文学家 Alastair Edge 教授在查看 SGS 图像时注意到引力透镜的巨大弧线。

快进 19 年，借助来自[{” attribute=””>NASA’s Hubble telescope and the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer facilities at Durham University, Dr. Nightingale and his team were able to revisit this and explore it further.

Exploring the mysteries of black holes

The team hopes that this is the first step in enabling a deeper exploration of the mysteries of black holes, and that future large-scale telescopes will help astronomers study even more distant black holes to learn more about their size and scale.

Reference: “Abell 1201: detection of an ultramassive black hole in a strong gravitational lens” by J W Nightingale, Russell J Smith, Qiuhan He, Conor M O’Riordan, Jacob A Kegerreis, Aristeidis Amvrosiadis, Alastair C Edge, Amy Etherington, Richard G Hayes, Ash Kelly, John R Lucey and Richard J Massey, 29 March 2023, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stad587

The research was supported by the UK Space Agency, the Royal Society, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the European Research Council.

This work used both the DiRAC Data Intensive Service (CSD3) and the DiRAC Memory Intensive Service (COSMA8), hosted by University of Cambridge and Durham University on behalf of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility.