'Giant Black Hole 660 Million Times Bigger Than Sun'
Highlights This is among the most precise measurements of the black hole's mass To calculate its mass, speed of things orbiting around it were measured The technique can be applied to black holes in other galaxies as well The mass of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a nearby giant elliptical galaxy is 660 million times greater than that of the Sun, astronomers have found. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and colleagues derived a highly precise measurement of the mass of the black hole using high-resolution data from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile. They were able to determine the speed of a disk of cold molecular gas and dust orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy NGC 1332. The researchers calculated the black hole's mass to be 660 million times greater than that of the Sun. This is among the most precise measurements for the mass of a galaxy's central bl...
