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It was thought to have a mass of about 3 billion sun. Now it's estimated mass is 6.4 billion suns.
Background
The Supermassive Black Hole of M87 and the Kinematics of Its Associated Gaseous Disk
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/489/2/579/36331.text.html
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/active/smblack.html
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1994/23
Spectacular Flaring In Extragalactic Jet From M87's Black Hole
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090414163735.htm
Imaging the Black Hole Silhouette of M87: Implications for Jet Formation and Black Hole Spin
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009ApJ...697.1164B
But now (announced at 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Karl Gebhardt and the UT team)
Texas-sized computer finds most massive black hole in galaxy M87
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8337
For the public:
A Real Whopper: Black Hole Is Most Massive Known
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090608/sc_space/arealwhopperblackholeismostmassiveknown
Background
The Supermassive Black Hole of M87 and the Kinematics of Its Associated Gaseous Disk
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/489/2/579/36331.text.html
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/active/smblack.html
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1994/23
Spectacular Flaring In Extragalactic Jet From M87's Black Hole
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090414163735.htm
Imaging the Black Hole Silhouette of M87: Implications for Jet Formation and Black Hole Spin
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009ApJ...697.1164B
But now (announced at 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Karl Gebhardt and the UT team)
Texas-sized computer finds most massive black hole in galaxy M87
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8337
Hopefully the model is consistent with other observations.Astronomers Karl Gebhardt from The University of Texas at Austin and Jens Thomas from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have used new computer modeling techniques to discover that the black hole at the heart of M87, one of the largest nearby giant galaxies, is two to three times more massive than previously thought. Weighing in at 6.4 billion times the Sun's mass, it is the most massive black hole measured with a robust technique, and it suggests that the accepted black hole masses in nearby large galaxies may be off by similar amounts. This has consequences for theories of how galaxies form and grow, and might even solve a long-standing astronomical paradox.
. . . .
To model M87, Gebhardt and Thomas used one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the Lonestar system at The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center. Lonestar is a Dell Linux cluster with 5,840 processing cores and can perform 62 trillion floating-point operations per second. (Today's top-of-the-line laptop computer has two cores and can perform up to 10 billion floating-point operations per second.)
Gebhardt and Thomas' model of M87 was more complicated than previous models of the galaxy because, in addition to modeling its stars and black hole, it takes into account the galaxy's "dark halo" - a spherical region surrounding a galaxy that extends beyond its main visible structure, containing the galaxy's mysterious "dark matter."
. . . .
For the public:
A Real Whopper: Black Hole Is Most Massive Known
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090608/sc_space/arealwhopperblackholeismostmassiveknown
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