Supermassive Black Hole seems to go missing 

  • IASbaba
  • January 11, 2021
  • 0
UPSC Articles

Supermassive Black Hole seems to go missing 

Part of: GS Prelims and GS-III –Sci & Tech

In news 

  • A supermassive black hole, which is estimated to weigh up to 100 billion times the mass of the Sun, is seemingly missing which has left astronomers perplexed.

Key takeaways 

  • Scientists have been looking for the black hole using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. 
  • However, so far, they have found no evidence of its existence. 
  • The black hole is supposed to be located in Abell 2261, an enormous galaxy cluster that is about 2.7 billion light-years away from the Earth.
  • At 2.7 billion light-years away, the Abell galaxy is at an overwhelmingly large distance away from us.

Do you know? 

  • Every large galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its centre, whose mass is millions or billions of times that of the Sun.
  • The black hole at the centre of our galaxy– the Milky Way– is called Sagittarius A*, and is 26,000 light-years away from Earth.

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