Supermassive Black Hole seems to go missing 

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.