One of the largest black holes ever found, recently discovered by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, is about 17 billion times larger than Earth's Sun.
The Heidenburg, a Germany-based observatory, said Wednesday that they found the massive black hole about 220 million light years away in a galaxy only one-tenth the size of the Milky Way.
The black hole, which they named NGC 1277, accounts for nearly a seventh of its host galaxy's overall mass, according to AFP, which is 14 percent of that entire galaxy.
"This is a really oddball galaxy," said Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin in a press release. "It's almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy black hole systems."
Black holes are space anomalies with a gravitational pull so powerful that not even light can escape it.
To put things in perspective, this newly-discovered black hole is approximately 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around our sun, according to researchers. NGC 1277 is the second biggest black hole ever observed; the current record holder, spotted in 2011, is somewhere between six and 37 billion solar masses.
The NGC 1277 galaxy looks to be around eight billion years old, which is fairly young. According to Gebhardt, in an interview with British news site The Register, the event that produced such a large black hole must have been formed by factors outside of their understanding.
"I would have said that it is unlikely that age has an effect, but we might be looking at a chicken and egg problem here. It is just not clear how to make a system with such a large black hole to galaxy ratio (a factor of 100 larger than typical ratios)," he explained.
In fact, this black hole is so large that scientists took a year to double-check and submit their research paper for publication, the study's lead author, Remco van den Bosch, told SPACE.com.
"The first time I calculated it, I thought I must have done something wrong. We tried it again with the same instrument, then a different instrument," said Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy astronomer van den Bosch. "Then I thought, 'Maybe something else is happening.'"
Additionally, van der Bosch's team says they have spotted five other galaxies near NGC 1277 that look about the same. This lends to the theory that those galaxies may also have black holes of similarly epic proportions within them.
"You always expect to find one sort [of a phenomenon], but now we have six of them," van den Bosch said. "We didn't expect them, because we do expect the black holes and the galaxies to influence each other."
The research will be revealed Nov. 29 in the latest edition of the journal Nature.
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