A team of astronomers has discovered one of the largest black holes ever observed, using new technology that could reveal more information about the thousands of these giant cosmic planets to be discovered in the coming years.

black hole “It is one of the largest processes ever discovered explained physicist James Nightingale of Durham University in the UK, quoting Science alert.

According to the study, this supermassive black hole has a mass of 33 billion that of the Sun published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It is the first black hole to be characterized thanks to the detection technique of gravitational lensing.

This phenomenon is caused by an object so massive that it causes space-time curvature. Therefore, light from a distant source appears distorted when passing near it.

But while we can see a galaxy, even from a great distance, we cannot see a black hole. This object is so dense that not even light can escape from it. What makes it “invisible”.

This time, the researchers were able to observe the light of a galaxy far behind the black hole, Abell 1201, whose path appears to have been diverted by the black hole itself, about 2 billion light-years from Earth.

Until now, to detect black holes, it was necessary to monitor the emissions of energy that they produce when they absorb matter around them, or to observe their influence on the trajectory of stars in orbit. These techniques only work with near-Earth black holes.

The discovery, which has now been reported by the team of astronomers, is based on images and computer simulations Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.