To that end, NASA and the European Space Agency are collaborating to develop the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna - or “LISA”, for short - a gravitational-wave measuring constellation of three spacecraft set to launch within the next ten years.īy firing laser beams back and forth over the millions of miles that will separate them - and measuring these distances - these spacecraft will detect the subtle changes in spacetime caused by passing gravitational waves. “Mergers of supermassive black holes will produce waves of much lower frequencies which can be detected using a space-based observatory millions of times larger than its Earth-based counterparts.” Ranked 4 th in the UK by The Guardian University Guide 2022, we are proud to deliver a teaching and learning experience for students which closely aligns with the research-intensive values and practices of the University.įeeling inspired? Visit our Physics webpages to learn more about our postgraduate and undergraduate programmes.NASA astrophysicist Dr Ira Thorpe - also of the Goddard Space Flight Center - said: “Since 2015, gravitational wave observatories on Earth have detected the mergers of black holes with a few dozen solar masses, thanks to the tiny ripples in spacetime these events produce. Our Department of Physics is a thriving centre for research and education. This work used both the DiRAC Data Intensive Service (CSD3) and the DiRAC Memory Intensive Service (COSMA8), hosted by University of Cambridge and Durham University on behalf of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility. The research was supported by the UK Space Agency, the Royal Society, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the European Research Council. Interested in studying at Durham? Explore our undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
#BIGGEST BLACK HOLE SOFTWARE#
Checkout the software used to perform this analysis – PyAutoLens.Read our profile on lead author, Dr James Nightingale and visit his website.
#BIGGEST BLACK HOLE FULL#
The story of this particular discovery started back in 2004 when fellow Durham University astronomer, Professor Alastair Edge, noticed a giant arc of a gravitational lens when reviewing images of a galaxy survey.įast forward 19 years and with the help of some extremely high-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble telescope and the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer facilities at Durham University, Dr Nightingale and his team were able to revisit this and explore it further.
This approach could let astronomers discover far more inactive and ultramassive black holes than previously thought and investigate how they grew so large. Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies. Most of the biggest black holes that we know about are in an active state, where matter pulled in close to the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, X-rays, and other radiation. This is the first black hole found using gravitational lensing and the findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. What the team had found was an ultramassive black hole, an object over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, in the foreground galaxy – a scale rarely seen by astronomers.
When the researchers included an ultramassive black hole in one of their simulations, the path taken by the light from the faraway galaxy to reach Earth matched the path seen in real images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The team simulated light travelling through the Universe hundreds of thousands of times, with each simulation including a different mass black hole, changing light’s journey to Earth. Gravitational lensing - where a foreground galaxy bends the light from a more distant object and magnifies it – and supercomputer simulations on the DiRAC HPC facility, enabled the team to closely examine how light is bent by a black hole inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years from Earth.
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