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PROVO — A Brigham Young University research project resulted in a published study about a black hole that is about eight million times the mass of the sun.
The supermassive black hole is located in galaxy KA 1858, between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, about 100 million light years away, according to a BYU news release.
BYU professor Michael Joner and graduate student Carla Carroll, co-authored the study that was published in the Astrophysical Journal Oct. 10.
With the help of NASA and other astrophysicists, Joner and Carroll studied the black hole using the NASA Kepler satellite. The satellite’s main mission involves hunting for earth-like planets within our galaxy, but the researchers were able to combine data from the Kepler mission with ground-based data to observe the black hole, the news release said.
Many of the ground-based observations were performed at BYU’s West Mountain Observatory, the largest research observatory in Utah.
“It was a long project that involved lots of different observers, some of them around the world,” Joner said in a news release. “Using measurements that were done at BYU, we were able to determine that the mass of the central black hole for this galaxy was about eight million times the mass of the sun — that’s a really, really, massive object.”
Astronomers typically use the light radiated by different objects to obtain measurements, but because black holes don’t give off any radiant energy, Joner and Carroll used a method known as reverberation mapping to gauge the size of the black hole, the news release said.
Reverberation mapping involves observing the light that is emitted as material spirals toward the black hole.
Current techniques for reverberation mapping require some of the largest telescopes in the world that are in high demand and are often overbooked, the news release said.
Carroll and Joner are working to develop a way to use smaller telescopes to observe different active galaxies so more astrophysicists have the opportunity to do similar studies.
