A Massive Black Hole Weighing As Much As 17 Billion Suns Spotted by NASA’s Hubble Telescope

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Hawaii's Gemini Telescope made an observation that indicate that these colossal objects of the universe are perhaps more popular than thought. So far, the largest galaxies discovered, approximately 10 billion times the mass of sun, have been at the center of some very large galaxies. In fact, the largest ever spotted is recorded at 21 billion suns, residing in a dense galaxy, Coma, that contains over 1,000 galaxies.

 "The newly discovered supersized black hole resides in the center of a massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1600, located in a cosmic backwater, a small grouping of 20 or so galaxies," said lead discoverer Chung-Pei Ma, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe.

While it is possible to spot a massive black hole in a crowded area of Universe, it is very unlikely to discover one in sparse areas of the universe.

"There are quite a few galaxies the size of NGC 1600 that reside in average-size galaxy groups," Ma said.

"We estimate that these smaller groups are about 50 times more abundant than spectacular galaxy clusters like the Coma cluster. So the question now is, 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?'"

"Maybe there are more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains," said Ma.

Ma and her team of scientists reported the discovery of the black, situated about 200 million light years from Earth towards constellation Eridanus in journal Nature. The lead author of the paper is Jens Thomas of Max Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany. The scientists explain that the most probable reason for the black hole's massive size is that perhaps at some point, this one merged with another when its interacted frequently with the galaxy.