Space & Astronomy

Most massive black hole ever seen has potentially been found

By T.K. Randall
September 2, 2025 ·  2 comments

Image: Black Hole - Large Magellanic Cloud
Credit: Alain r / CC BY-SA 2.5 (adapted) Black holes are perhaps the most unnerving of all celestial objects, especially given that some of them are so large that they could swallow up, not only the Earth, but the entire solar system.

Typical black holes are formed when particularly massive stars collapse, but there are some others - in particular those that are much, much larger - that remain difficult to explain.

Now scientists have discovered what could potentially be the single most massive black hole in the known universe - an absolute gargantuan monster 36 billion times more massive than the Sun.It is situated in a particularly large galaxy over 5 billion light years from Earth.

Despite its huge size, this black hole is actually dormant, meaning that it is relatively quiet and isn't actively consuming the matter around it.

Even so, this thing is a behemoth - to put it into perspective, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy is around 4.15 million solar masses - that's thousands of times less.

Exactly how it came to form and how it got quite so massive remains unclear.

Source: Space.com | Comments (2)

Tags: Black Hole