Most Massive Black Hole Ever Discovered In Nearby Galaxy

Andrea Thompson, Space: The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development.

“We did not expect it at all,” said team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin. The discovery was announced Monday at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The finding “is important for how black holes relate to galaxies,” said team member Jens Thomas of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. “If you change the mass of the black hole, you change how the black hole relates to the galaxy.”

Because of this relationship, the revised mass could impact astronomers’ theories of how galaxies grow and form. Higher black hole masses could also solve a paradox of the masses of faraway, developing galaxies called quasars. These mysterious denizens of the early universe are very bright, developing galaxies with black holes surrounded by gas and dust, all rife with star formation. Quasars are colossal, around 10 billion solar masses, “but in local galaxies, we never saw black holes that massive, not nearly,” Gebhardt said.
