Black Hole traps six giant galaxies in 'Spider Web', see details here

Recently, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) spotted six massive galaxies trapped in a web. The supposed web was in reality a supermassive black hole. This powerful blackhole is under one billion light-years away from Earth. This startling discovery was published as a study by the ESO on its official journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The black hole is as dense as one billion times the mass of Earth’s sun. The massive galaxies are all huddled in together in a web of has which extends to over 300 times the size of the milky way galaxy.

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Supermassive Blackhole has several galaxies in it

Marco Mignoli is one of the lead authors of this discovery and has stated in the journal, “The cosmic filaments are like spider’s web threads.” This is the first time that researchers and astronomers have spotted a large number of galaxies tucked in so close to one another. The co-author of this study Barbara Balmaverde has stated mentioned that the researchers have only discovered the tip of the iceberg so far. Few of the galaxies tucked inside the supermassive black hole are one of the brightest ones they have ever seen.

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What created this web around the supermassive black hole?

Another co-author of this study, Roberto Gilli said that the scientist's work has placed an important piece of information in the puzzle which was largely incomplete. We can learn much about the formation and growth of the blackholes after the Big Bang. The web of galaxies inside the black hole has enough gas to provide fuel to the central black hole to grow into a ginormous one. In the end, the study basically proposes the key to the formation of these web-like structures are ‘giant halos of mysterious dark matter.”

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The supermassive black hole at the heart of Messier 87 galaxy

Another recent study published on Thursday, October 1 in the journal Physical Review Letters by researchers from the EHT stated that the images of the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy have put Einstein's theory to test yet again. The black hole, M87*, is the same black hole researchers used to create the first-ever image of a black hole by the EHT team in 2019. Lia Medeiros, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study and co-author of the study said that it is possible to use an image of a black hole to test the theory of gravity.

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