Taiwanese American astronomer Chung-pei Mas has led a team in discovering the two largest black holes ever spotted, according to the Dec. 8 issue of the British journal Nature. Each black holes has the mass of 10 billion of our suns.
Ma and graduate student Nicholas McConnell used the KECK and Gemini high-power telescopes atop Hawaii’s Mount Mauna Kea to discover the two giant black holes located in two elliptical galaxies about 270 million light years from earth. The size of each of the two black holes is seven times that of our solar system.
Ma’s team had been seeking massive black holes but had not expected to find ones so massive. Not only are the black holes the biggest ever discovered, Ma believes they could well be the biggest in the universe and that the chance of discovering a larger hole is small.
Ma is a theoretical astrophysicist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. She also sits on an overseas academic advisory panel at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top research institute. She is the daughter of Ma Chi-shen, a veteran journalist and Huang Chao-heng, a former member of Taiwan’s Control Yuan, the top government watchdog agency. She won the Outstanding Overseas Chinese Physics Prize for Young Researchers in 2001.
A scientific paper on the newly discovered black holes was published in the Dec. 8 issue of the British journal Nature.
