Nature.com reported a study in which scientists have identified the largest black hole ever found, in the universe as we know it. It is at the center of a small galaxy, about 250 million light-years from Earth, called NGC 1277. Pictured above in a photo taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 1277 is located in the constellation Perseus.
Typically most black holes weigh an average of 0.1% of the galaxy’s mass. The “over-massive” black hole inside the “compact lenticular” NGC 1277 galaxy has a mass that is 14% of the galaxy, or a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns.
Karl Gebhardt, who studied the Hubble’s NGC 1277 images based out of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. “This is a really oddball galaxy. It’s almost all black hole.”
Remco van den Bosch, an astronomer at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, states there are five other similar galaxies near NGC 1277 that may possibly include more massive black holes.