Supermassive Black Hole seems to go missing

Part of: GS Prelims and GS-III –Sci & Tech

In news 

    A supermassive black hole, which is estimated to weigh up to 100 billion times the mass of the Sun, is seemingly missing which has left astronomers perplexed.

Key takeaways 

    Scientists have been looking for the black hole using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. 

    However, so far, they have found no evidence of its existence. 

    The black hole is supposed to be located in Abell 2261, an enormous galaxy cluster that is about 2.7 billion light-years away from the Earth.

    At 2.7 billion light-years away, the Abell galaxy is at an overwhelmingly large distance away from us.

Do you know? 

    Every large galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its centre, whose mass is millions or billions of times that of the Sun.

    The black hole at the centre of our galaxy– the Milky Way– is called Sagittarius A*, and is 26,000 light-years away from Earth.