Astronomers have identified what could be a new supermassive black hole, and with an estimated mass 36 billion times that of the sun, it is about 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This would make it among the most massive objects ever detected.

The finding, published in the Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, was made by researchers from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in the UK in collaboration with the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil. The scientists located the signs of the new supermassive black hole within a gravitational lens known as the “Cosmic Horseshoe,” pictured below. A gravitational lens occurs when the gravity of a massive object, such as a galaxy, is so great that it bends light and time that passes near it, distorting light traveling from behind.

The Cosmic Horsehoe was discovered by the Hubble telescope in 2007. The galaxy LRG 3-757 sits at its center, while the blue horseshoe shape surrounding this yellow-colored object is distorted light emitted from another galaxy beyond it. LRG 3-757 is one of the most massive galaxies ever observed by astronomers, having a mass 100 times that of the Milky Way, and it sits approximately 5.6 billion light-years away from Earth.

Thanks to this luminous structure, astronomers have been able to calculate the mass of the black hole that presumably lies at the center of LRG 3-757 (while not definitively proven, large galaxies are assumed to have a black hole at their center). Although there are no direct observations of this black hole, measurements of the motion of light in the ring and the velocity of stars in the inner regions of the galaxy are consistent with the presence of an ultramassive black hole. “By combining these two measurements we can be completely confident that the black hole is rea...