In 2009, a team of astronomers used the Swift Spacecraft to measure the luminosity output of a distant Quasar, named S5 0014+81, and measure the mass of the central black hole. To their surprise, they found out that this black hole contains actually 40 billion solar masses, that is 10,000 times more massive than the black hole at the center of our galaxy. This makes it one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, more than six times the value of the black hole of Messier 87, which was thought to be the largest black hole for almost 60 years, and was coined to be an “ultramassive” black hole. The Schwarzschild radius of this black hole is 118 billion kilometers. In the picture above the event horizon of this ultramassive black hole is compared to oursolar system (i.imgur.com).
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IMAPP, Radboud University,
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-European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO)
-Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (MPE, Garching)
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