Behemoth Black Hole Found in an Unlikely Place

NASA | APRIL 6, 2016

Astronomers have uncovered a near-record breaking supermassive black hole, weighing 17 billion suns, in an unlikely place: in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe.

This computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. Credits: NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI)

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.

Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes – those roughly 10 billion times the mass of our sun – have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions of the universe packed with other large galaxies. In fact, the current record holder tips the scale at 21 billion suns and resides in the crowded Coma galaxy cluster that consists of over 1,000 galaxies.

The researchers were surprised to discover that the black hole is 10 times more massive than they had predicted for a galaxy of this mass. Based on previous Hubble surveys of black holes, astronomers had developed a correlation between a black hole’s mass and the mass of its host galaxy’s central bulge of stars – the larger the galaxy bulge, the proportionally more massive the black hole. But for galaxy NGC 1600, the giant black hole’s mass far overshadows the mass of its relatively sparse bulge.

The black hole is located about 200 million light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Eridanus.

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