Thinking about outer space and the universe is an exciting process for some people, while for others it’s completely terrifying. It just makes us feel too small and insignificant! Well, to make you feel even smaller, astronomers have found a Super Massive Black Hole that is 40 billion times the size of our sun! It’s 700 million lightyears away from Earth, in the Holmberg 15A Galaxy. They observed it over two nights, tracking the movement of stars around it to measure its size. The accuracy of their measurements has not yet been verified by peer review, but if it turns out to be correct, this will be one of the largest black holes ever found. The largest one ever discovered is the Ultra Massive Black Hole at the center of TON 618, over 10 billion light years away. That particular black hole is thought to be 66 billion times bigger than the sun! The research team behind this latest discovery in the Holmberg 15A Galaxy hypothesize that it became so unimaginably large as a result of two or more Early Type Galaxies merging together. They intend to continue investigating their discovery, to gain more insight into the merging of galaxies and the origins of such huge black holes.
