Astronomers have discovered what they believe to be the biggest black hole ever known in a small galaxy around 250 million light-years away from earth according to Space.com.
Click here to see images of the black hole.
The report states that the black hole is the "equivalent to 17 billion suns" and is located in the NGC 1277 galaxy in the constellation Perseus. This means that the black hole is around 14 percent of the entire galaxy's mass. In comparison, a normal black hole represents around 0.1 percent of a galaxy usually.
"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 black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems."
A team of astronomers made the discovery using an instrument called a spectrometer according to The Huffington Post . The instrument works by spreading light out into its constituent wavelengths, attached to the European Southern Observatory's Telescope which is located in Chile. Researchers were alarmed when they saw a giant cloud of hot gas that was blasted away from the galaxy almost 5,000 miles per second according to the report.
The black hole is around 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around our sun according to writer Remco van den Bosch. The mass exceeds the normal number expected for a black hole by a great amount which caused experts to double check their work to make sure the number was indeed correct.
A team led by van den Bosch discovered the black hole by accident during a survey to seek the biggest black holes they could find. They never imagined finding one as big as they did.
"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.'"
More information on the black hole can be found in the latest edition of the journal Nature.
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