Giant black holes are among the largest objects in our Universe and can be between 10 and 40 billion times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers believe that these objects are often found at the centre of large galaxies, such as our Milky Way.

The astronomers responsible for the investigation used a new technique that led them to use a nearby galaxy as a magnifying glass - which revealed the location of this giant black hole. As for the size of this black hole, the scientists resorted to supercomputer simulations and also to images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.


“This particular black hole, which is roughly 33 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the largest ever detected and is on the cusp of how big black holes can theoretically get, which is an extremely exciting discovery”, says one of the main researchers, James Nightingale, and author of the study published by the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.