A Northern Kentucky University professor and his colleagues have discovered that one of the universe’s biggest black holes is much smaller than initially thought.
The research conducted by Dirk Grupe, NKU associate professor and chair of the Department of Physics, Geology and Engineering Technology, and colleagues at the Max-Plank-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany have been accepted in the Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society and the Astrophysical Journal.
Their research shows that the black hole, located nearly 5.1 billion light years away, is the size of 100 million solar masses instead of the previously believed 10 billion solar masses.
The international research group was able to test binary model predictions using multiple observation tools, including the Effelsberg radio telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. For the first time, an independent black hole mass determination of the system was performed, and the amount of matter in a disk surrounding the black hole could be estimated.
There were also collaborators from institutions in China, Chile, Canada and Spain.
The results show that an exceptionally massive black hole exceeding 10 billion solar masses is no longer needed. Instead, the results favor models with a smaller black hole mass of 100 million solar masses.
Several outstanding mysteries, including the apparent absence of the latest big outburst of OJ 287 (which has now been identified) and the much-discussed emission mechanism during the main outbursts, can be solved this way.
For more information on the research and its findings, visit the Max-Plank-Institute’s website.