

Newly discovered black hole is 17 billion times the mass of the sun, may be biggest ever found

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This image released July 11, 2012 shows a  computer-simulated image of gas from a star that is ripped apart by tidal forces as it falls into a black hole.

Black hole in NGC 1277 is 17 billion times the mass of the sun, may be biggest ever found



Scientists generally posit supermassive black holes only develop in large galaxies, but the finding in NGC 1277 throws a wrench in that.

“This galaxy seems to be very old,” Dr. Remco van den Bosch, the leader of the study told the BBC. “So somehow this black hole grew very quickly a long time ago, but since then that galaxy has been sitting there not forming any new stars or anything else.”

Then again, Dr. van den Bosch says that could be completely wrong and the black hole might be as old as the universe.

“It could just be this thing has been sitting around since the Big Bang and not done much since then,” he told “It might be a relic of what star formation and galactic formation looked like at that time.”

The NGC 1277 also fills a huge volume of space, with a diameter of over 300 Astronomical Units (AU). The Earth’s orbit is one AU. While it only takes light 17 minutes for light to cross the diameter of the Earth’s orbit, it would take almost four days for light to cross this black hole. If, you know, the light wasn’t pulled into the gravity well. (Which it would be. Because it’s a black hole.)

Black holes super compact groups of mass so dense that their gravitational effects warp space-time. They are defined by an “event horizon,” the point around the mass where nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational field. (If someone asks if anything can escape the event horizon of a black hole, tell them that by definition it is impossible — if something can escape, then it isn’t an event horizon.)

You can read the full scientific study of the NGC 1277 black hole in this month’s issue of Nature.


*(The largest black hole ever found, in Galaxy NGC 4889, has an estimated mass 21 billion times that of our sun, however, measuring the mass of black holes so far away has a large margin of error, and the black hole at NGC 4889 may indeed be smaller than the newly discovered one at NGC 1277)

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