Astronomers discover largest known black hole, its mass is 32.7 billion times that of Sun

Astronomers have discovered the largest black hole known to date. Its mass is 32.7 billion times that of the Sun, and it is located in the center of one of the galaxies in the Abell 1201 cluster, which is 2.7 billion light-years away from Earth.

Space.com notes that astronomers call this cosmic monster a supermassive black hole because it is much larger than "ordinary" supermassive black holes, which range in mass from a few million to a few billion times the mass of the Sun.

"This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery," James Nightingale, an astrophysicist at Durham University in the UK and lead author of the new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society magazine, said in a statement.

A team of astronomers determined the size of this black hole by analyzing a series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Using sophisticated computer modeling, astronomers were able to calculate how much light is refracted around the galaxy where the black hole is located.

They tested the sizes of thousands of black holes before arriving at numbers that matched observations. Thus, the astronomers attributed the discovered phenomenon to supermassive black holes, the mass of which exceeds 10 billion suns and approaches the theoretical upper limit of the mass of a black hole equal to 50 billion suns.

This mass also ranks the Abell 1021 BCG black hole among the ten most massive black holes discovered to date. According to astronomers, the diameter of its event horizon will be more than 1,290 astronomical units (AUs). By comparison, Pluto is only 40 AU from the Sun.

Despite its enormous size, this black hole is not very active; that is, it does not absorb a large amount of matter and, therefore, does not produce strong X-rays. According to astronomers, it is almost impossible to study such black holes with other methods.