Scientists have discovered the two biggest black holes ever observed, each with a mass billions of times greater than the Sun's, a new study reveals.
The two giants are located in the heart of a pair of galaxies several hundred million light years from Earth, the study recently published in scientific journal Nature, says.
Each black hole is estimated to have a mass about 10 billion times greater than the sun, dwarfing the previously largest-known black hole, which has a mass of 6.3 billion suns.
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The University of California, Berkeley, team led by Nicholas McConnell and Chung-Pei Ma said one black hole is located in NGC 3842, the brightest of a cluster of galaxies about 320 million light years from Earth.
The second hole is of "comparable or greater mass" and is located in NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster, about 335 million light years away.
“These are the most massive reliably-measured black holes ever,” McConnell told The New York Times in an email.
McConnell and Ma say their calculations suggest that different evolutionary processes influence the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes than in smaller galaxies.
“Measurements of these massive black holes will help us understand how their host galaxies were assembled, and how the holes achieved such monstrous mass,” McConnell said.
Astronomers have long supposed that since the universe began it has harboured black holes with a mass the size of the two newly found giants.
These cosmic gluttons grow in tandem with their galaxies, slurping up gases, planets and stars.
"There is a symbiotic relationship between black holes and their galaxies that has existed since the dawn of time," Kevin Schawinski, a Yale astronomer said in a June study.
