Studying bent light helps detect an ultramassive black hole for first time

New Delhi, Mar 30 (PTI) Astronomers have discovered one of the biggest black holes inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years from Earth, through gravitational lensing for the first time, throwing the field open for detecting more black holes and investigating their origins.

Gravitational lensing is where a foreground galaxy bends the light coming from a more distant object and magnifies it.

The researchers, led by Durham University, UK, by closely examining how light is bent by the black hole, found an ultramassive black hole with a mass of over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun in the foreground galaxy - a scale rarely seen by astronomers, they said in a study.