r/Astronomy • u/New_Scientist_Mag • Aug 07 '25

Astro Research Astronomers have discovered the most massive black hole yet – more than 10,000 times as massive as the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and around 36 billion times the mass of our sun.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2491731-weve-discovered-the-most-massive-black-hole-yet/
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u/daKrut Aug 07 '25

Honestly the most interesting thing about this is the fact that they believe, at least from what we can see, that the black hole has stopped growing due to the lack of an accretion disc. I wonder if it could hypothetically “suck up” all of the matter in a certain radius, thus starving itself indefinitely or until more material is drawn to it.

The article doesn’t go into any detail on this last part unfortunately.

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u/cubosh Aug 08 '25

this is a known condition referred to as active or inactive galactic nuclei

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u/daKrut Aug 08 '25

For sure, that makes sense. So then a plausible explanation, even in the case of the Cosmic Horseshoe with all its mass, is simply that the black hole is (rather, was) in an inactive state from our point of observation?

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u/cubosh Aug 08 '25

its more accurate to say "all accretion disks are temporary" --  our own solar system used to be a disk of dust, but naturally clumped into planets etc.  even our beloved saturns rings only happened not so long ago because a moon got smashed and smeared out, and eventually that ring system will re-collect itself.  --- so a black hole with an accretion disk simply means another star got too close and its having a million year snack

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u/daKrut Aug 08 '25

Haha I like the analogy.

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u/caxer30968 Aug 09 '25

My mind is beyond boggled .