Biggest Supermassive Black Hole and Most Unusual Discovered

By on Dec 1, 2012 in Astonishing Discoveries | 0 comments

Credit: NASA/ESA/Andrew C. Fabian The biggest supermassive black hole was recently discovered by astronomers thus far. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory astronomers have discovered this beast, located in the constellation Perseus,  to have a mass of 17 billion solar masses! A solar mass is the mass of our own Sun. So you can almost imagine how dense and heavy this supermassive black hole is. Now what makes this even more unusual is how much of the galaxies mass it has inside. Now to give you a little context astronomers have only measured the weight of about 100 or less black holes. So that data isn’t exactly all there but what the norm has been is that a typical black hole usually consists of 0.1% of a galaxy’s mass. However this behemoth has 14% of it’s galaxy’s mass! You can imagine how extreme...