A supermassive black hole found in the NGC 1277 galaxy is among the largest every discovered and just might be the biggest.
The supermassive black hole is located about 250 million light-years from Earth in the Perseus constellation. It is so large that it's mass is the equivalent of 17 billion suns and it makes up roughly 14 percent of the entire galaxy's mass. Typically black holes only represent 0.1 percent, according to Space.com.
"This is a really oddball galaxy," study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin told Space.com "It's almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems."
The black hole is about 11 time wider than the orbit of Neptune around our sun. Scientists needed over a year to confirm their research before submitting to to be published because it is so large.
"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," van den Bosch, an astronomer at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, told SPACE.com. "Then I thought, 'Maybe something else is happening.'"
This newly found black hole may be larger than the previously largest known black hole. The competitor in NGC 4486B is estimated to be between 6 billion and 37 billion solar masses in size, but this is not confirmed. It takes up 11 percent of the galaxy's central mass. the central mass is made up of a group on stars at the core. This new black hole makes up about 59 percent of the galaxy's central mass.
"It is definitely the black hole with the largest ratio of black hole to galaxy mass," Gebhardt told The Huffington Post. "The ratio is about 100 times larger than typical galaxies."
While this very well may be the largest black hole, there could be ones out there that are even bigger. Van der Bosch's team found five other galaxies near NGC 1277 and they may have black holes of their own.
"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."
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