Science Friday
Mar 31, 2023
Early Spring, Mumps On The Rise, Gulf Of Maine, Supermassive Black Hole. March 31, 2023, Part 1
A Supermassive Black Hole The Mass Of 30 Billion Suns
This week, astronomers reported that they may have found signs of one of the largest black holes ever detected–a space behemoth the mass of some 30 billion suns. The supermassive black hole, located in part of the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster, was detected using a combination of gravitational lensing and supercomputer simulations. First, the astronomers observed how the images of other more distant objects viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope were warped by the vast gravitational well produced by the black hole. They compared those images to thousands of simulations created via a supercomputer, and found that a simulation containing a supermassive black hole matched the real-world images. The work was reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins SciFri’s Kathleen Davis to talk about the finding and other stories from the week in science, including the FDA’s a…