Scientists think they may have discovered the largest pair of black holes to ever exist.
The two black holes together are estimated to weigh about 60 billion times more than the Sun, which is much bigger than any other known black hole pair. Back in 2018, astronomers noticed a huge dark area in the centre of the galaxy. At first, they thought it was just a cloud of dust blocking the light from stars. But newer observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and a very large telescope showed that the area actually has almost no stars at all. The two black holes will eventually merge into one even larger black hole, and this new black hole could become one of the biggest ever known in the universe.
The black holes’ masses make the sighting rare. Scientists will use these results to better understand how often supermassive black hole mergers take place and how they shape the galaxies around them.
