Astronomers have discovered what may be the most massive black hole ever known in a small galaxy about 250 million light-years from Earth, scientists say.
The supermassive black hole has a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns and is located inside the galaxy NGC 1277 in the constellation Perseus. It makes up about 14 percent of its host galaxy’s mass, compared with the 0.1 percent a normal black hole would represent, scientists said.
“This is a really oddball galaxy,” said study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin, in a statement. “It’s almost all blackhole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.”
Astronomers have discovered what may be the most massive black hole ever known in a small galaxy about 250 million light-years from Earth, scientists say.
The giant black hole is about 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around our sun, researchers said. The mass is so far above normal that the scientists took a year to double-check and submit their research paper for publication, according to the study’s lead author, Remco van den Bosch.
“The first time I calculated it, I thought I must have done something wrong. We tried it again with the same instrument, then a different instrument,” van den Bosch, an astronomer at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said. “Then I thought, ‘Maybe something else is happening.’”
The finding may have implications for our understanding of how giant black holes evolve in the center of galaxies.
