![]() Credit: Artist impression: Carl Knox, OzGrav The new black hole was found through the detection of a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst. Powerful software developed to detect black holes from gravitational waves was adapted to establish that the two flashes are images of the same object. This echo is caused by the intervening intermediate-mass black hole, which bends the path of the light on its way to Earth, so that astronomers see the same flash twice. The gamma-ray burst, a half-second flash of high-energy light emitted by a pair of merging stars, was observed to have a tell-tale ‘echo’. “While we know that these supermassive black holes lurk in the cores of most, if not all galaxies, we don’t understand how these behemoths are able to grow so large within the age of the Universe,” he said. Lead author and University of Melbourne PhD student, James Paynter, said the latest discovery sheds new light on how supermassive black holes form. The discovery was published today in the paper “Evidence for an intermediate mass black hole from a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst” in the journal Nature Astronomy. In a joint effort, researchers from the University of Melbourne and Monash University have uncovered a black hole approximately 55,000 times the mass of the sun, a fabled “intermediate-mass” black hole. ![]()
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