This was a good week for astronomers everywhere, as they realised a supermassive black hole was hiding in a galaxy located about 300 million light-years away.
The NGC 4889 was home to a black hole that surpasses the size of the Sun by 21 million times! Also, get this: its event horizon – the edge where nothing can be seen and nothing can escape – measures 130 billion kilometers in diameter. If you have nothing to compare these numbers to, picture the diameter of Neptun’s orbit around the Sun. Now, multiply that with 15.
According to scientists at the Hubble Space Telescope, this amazing force of nature is dormant now, but it used to feed on space junk – gas, dust, galactic debris. During that time, it emitted 1000 time more energy towards the galaxy than our Milky Way does.
Its extraordinary measures and behaviour couldn’t be observed directly but scientists used the objects surrounding it for calculations. FYI – in order to measure a black hole, you have to observe the velocity of the stars moving around the center point of the galaxy.
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