Weighing the Black Hole in M87

Astronomers using the Gemini telescope have "weighed" the black hole at the centre of the M87 Galaxy. They found it to be mass of 6.6 billion Suns, the largest ever...

25 February 2011

By Chris Smith.

Part of the show Kepler 11 - A Unique Extrasolar System

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Artist's concept of what a future telescope might see in looking at the black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87. Clumpy gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk, feeding the central beast. The black area at center is the black hole...

Credit:

Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook.

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Astronomers using the Gemini telescope have "weighed" the black hole at the centre of the M87 Galaxy. Artist They found it to be mass of 6.6 billion Suns, the largest ever measured for a black hole using a direct technique.

Using the Near-Infrared Field Spectrograph (NIFS) on Gemini, an 8-metre telescope in Hawaii, researchers measured the speed of stars orbiting the centre of the galaxy, and from this were able to calculate the mass of it's black hole...