How massive can a black hole be? A team of astronomers from the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) has calculated that the most colossal black holes, those found in the center of galaxies, can reach a mass of up to 50,000 million suns before losing the disks of gas that feed them energy.
These disks of gas that surround the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are quite unstable and tend to crumble into stars. Now, by calculating how big a black hole could be around its outer edge until the forming disk stopped dropping energy and collapsed into stars, scientists have established the top figure of 50 billion solar masses.
According to the study published in Arxiv , without a disk (unless it merged with another black hole, for example), the black hole would not have sustenance to grow, so this figure would be the growth ceiling, its upper limit. .
Why is this discovery important?
This finding helps the scientific community to be certain that we have discovered supermassive black holes of almost the maximum mass now established, observing the enormous amount of radiation emitted by the gas disk that falls into them.
However, “they could be detected in other ways, for example, when the black hole tilts the light rays that pass very close (gravitational lensing) or perhaps in the future by gravitational waves that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts that they are emitted when merging ”, explains Andrew King, leader of the study.
