Biggest Black Holes Ever Detected

And they've feasted on the souls of 10 billion suns.

University of Toronto scientists were part of an international team that discovered the existence of two massive black holes – black holes so big that they've both swallowed up the equivalent of some 10 billion stars. Those two black holes are far, far away from our solar system – one's in the galaxy NGC 3842, about 320 million light years away, the other's in galaxy NGC 4889, about 336 million light years away. And while astronomers can't "see" black holes, as the collapsed stars suck in everything, including light, they can measure the holes' effect on nearby stars to determine their size. These holes happen to be huge – a thousand times bigger than the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. The holes are helped by the fact that they're in much larger galaxies than our medium-sized Milky Way, giving them far more material to snatch up in their gravitational fields.

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