Up untill nolw, the largest known central supermassive black hole has been in the core of the M87 galaxy at 6,3 billion solar masses. But a new paper in Nature describes the finding of 2 supermassive black holes in NGC 3842 and NGC 4889 - each at ~10 billion solar masses.

Observational work conducted over the past few decades indicates that all massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres.

Although the luminosities and brightness fluctuations of quasars in the early Universe suggest that some were powered by black holes with masses greater than 10 billion solar masses, the remnants of these objects have not been found in the nearby Universe.

The giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 hosts the hitherto most massive known black hole, which has a mass of 6,3 billion solar masses. Here we report that NGC 3842, the brightest galaxy in a cluster at a distance from Earth of 319 million lightyears, has a central black hole with a mass of 9,7 billion solar masses, and that a black hole of comparable or greater mass is present in NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster at a distance of 336 million lightyears.

These two black holes are significantly more massive than predicted by linearly extrapolating the widely used correlations between black-hole mass and the stellar velocity dispersion or bulge luminosity of the host galaxy. Although these correlations remain useful for predicting black-hole masses in less massive elliptical galaxies, our measurements suggest that different evolutionary processes influence

Sopurce: Nature Letters