Astronomers Find the Biggest Black Hole Ever Measured

"Astronomers have found the biggest black hole ever measured -- it's 40 billion times the sun's mass, or roughly two-thirds the mass of all stars in the Milky Way," writes Astronomy.com. Iwastheone shares their report:The gargantuan black hole lurks in a galaxy that's supermassive itself and probably formed from the collisions of at least eight smaller galaxies. Holm 15A is a huge elliptical galaxy at the center of a cluster of galaxies called Abell 85... When two spiral galaxies -- like our Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda Galaxy -- collide, they can merge and form an elliptical galaxy. In crowded environments like galaxy clusters, these elliptical galaxies can collide and merge again to form an even larger elliptical galaxy. Their central black holes combine as well and make larger black holes, which can kick huge swaths of nearby stars out to the edges of the newly formed galaxy. The resulting extra-large elliptical galaxy usually doesn't have much gas from which to form new stars, so its center looks pretty bare after its black hole kicks out nearby stars. Astronomers call these huge elliptical galaxies with faint centers "cored galaxies." Massive cored galaxies often sit in the centers of galaxy clusters. The authors of the new study found that Holm 15A, the enormous galaxy at the center of its home galaxy cluster, must have formed from yet another merger of two already-huge cored elliptical galaxies. That would mean Holm 15A probably formed from the combination of eight smaller spiral galaxies over billions of years... This series of mergers also created the black hole in its center, a monster about as big as our solar system but with the mass of 40 billion suns. One of the study's authors says their discovery finally confirms the current theory about how quasars work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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