00:03black holes especially supermassive ones are well really really big but recently using a wild
00:09technique astronomers from durham university discovered possibly the largest one ever detected
00:14the black hole is a whopping 32.7 billion times the mass of our sun and it resides some 2
00:19.7
00:20billion light years away and the only reason astronomers were able to tell it was there
00:24is because of a technique called gravitational lensing gravitational lensing occurs when space
00:28time gets bent by the mass of another large object this causes the image to warp and elongate meaning
00:33it's often magnified as well in this case galactic cluster able 1201 was the lens magnifying the image
00:40of this newly discovered black hole but it wasn't easy researchers first noticed a phenomenon in the
00:44form of a smear way back in 2003 first needing to produce new tools and techniques for undoing and
00:50interpreting the magnified stretching of the image they now say the event horizon of this black hole
00:54would stretch an inconceivable 1290 astronomical units which science alert reported that for
01:01context that's more than 32 times the distance pluto is from the sun
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