A massive black hole has been found in space that astronomers say is 17 billion times larger than our sun.
The finding may be the most massive black hole ever known, and it’s located in a small galaxy about 250 million light years away from Earth, Space.com reported . Black holes normally occupy about 0.1 percent of the mass of its host galaxy, but the massive black hole found in galaxy NGC 1277 actually makes up about 14 percent of the total mass, scientists say.
“This is a really oddball galaxy,” noted researcher Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.”
The massive black hole is about 11 times as wide as Neptune’s orbit around our sun, and its mass is so far about normal for black holes that scientists had to double-check before submitting their research paper for publication, lead author Remco van den Bosch noted.
“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, told Space.com . “Then I thought, ‘Maybe something else is happening.’”
The massive black hole found by van den Bosch’s team was not the only discovery announced Wednesday. A second black hole was found by the the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Paranal, Chile, the Daily Mail reported . This rate that energy is carried away by the large mass of ejected material equals two trillion times the power output of the sun, the report noted.
