Supermassive Black Hole Discovered By International Astronomers Is 17 Billion Times Bigger Than The Sun

Astronomers have discovered a huge black hole so massive that it takes over the center of a small galaxy nearly 250 million light-years from Earth, scientists announced. The black hole, which is located in the galaxy NGC 1277, is so large that it challenges previously thought notions on how black holes behave, the Los Angeles Times reported.

According to Nature journal, where the study is published, the supermassive black hole has a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns and amounts to about 59 percent of its host galaxy's central bulge of stars. The average black hole makes up around 0.1 percent of a galaxy's stellar bulge mass.

Space.com reported that the massive black hole is nearly 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around the sun.

In a statement released, study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin said, "This is a really oddball galaxy. It's almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems."

The team of researchers, led by co-author Remco van den Bosch of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, also discovered five other massive but compact galaxies with stars orbiting the central region at high speeds, Nature journal reported. According to the journal the group of astronomers made their observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Fort Davis, Texas.

The new discovery challenges previously thought ideas on how massive black holes evolve at the center of galaxies, Space.com reported. Astronomers normally associate the size of the central part of the galaxy to the black hole inside it.

Jenny Greene of Princeton University, who is not associated to the study, told Nature journal that galaxies and their central black holes grow in unison until reaching a certain point. Nature reported, "When a black hole gets big enough, it generates a wind so powerful that it blows all the gas out of the galaxy, halting both star formation and the infall of new material onto the black hole."

However, the massive black hole in the center of NGC 1277 did not stop growing. If the team finds more examples of these supermassive black holes in small galaxies, it could signify an entirely new class of galaxies, the LA Times reported.

Gebhardt told the LA Times that if it is a new class of galaxies, it is a really small one. "In the observable universe, there's about 100 billion [galaxies]," he said. "So this isn't even the tip of the iceberg. This is a snowflake on top of the tip of the iceberg."