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Monster Black Hole Is Biggest Ever Found

This image shows the disk galaxy NGC 1277, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The small, flattened galaxy has one of the biggest central super-massive black holes ever found in its center, the equivalent of 17 billion suns.
CREDIT: NASA / ESA / Andrew C. Fabian / Remco C. E. van den Bosch (MPIA)
28 November 2012
Astronomers have discovered what may be the most massive black hole ever known in a small galaxy about 250 million light-years from Earth, scientists say.
The supermassive black hole [ http://www.space.com/18671-super-giant-black-hole-discovered-video.html ] has a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns and is located inside the galaxy NGC 1277 in the constellation Perseus. It makes up about 14 percent of its host galaxy's mass, compared with the 0.1 percent a normal black hole would represent, scientists said.
"This is a really oddball galaxy," said study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. "It's almost all black hole [ http://www.space.com/15421-black-holes-facts-formation-discovery-sdcmp.html ]. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems."
The giant black hole is about 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around our sun, researchers said. The mass is so far above normal that the scientists took a year to double-check and submit their research paper for publication, according to the study's lead author, Remco van den Bosch.
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http://www.space.com/18668-biggest-black-hole-discovery.html [with comments]