The Blackest Black Hole: Scientists Find a Monster the Size of 21 Billion Suns

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They're huge. They're voracious. They're blacker than a panther on a moonless night. They're black holes, the mind-bending, space-warping cosmic objects with gravity so insanely powerful that even a beam of light that wanders too close will be sucked in, never to emerge. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted they might exist, but the great physicist himself doubted it would really happen.

Einstein was wrong. Over the past decade or two, black holes have been discovered all over the place — small ones peppered around the Milky Way and huge ones, impressively called "supermassive" black holes, lurking the centers of galaxies. The one at the core of Milky Way weighs as much as a couple of million stars, and it could swallow the sun without even noticing, the way you'd swallow a pistachio.

But that's positively puny compared with the two new black holes, each about 330 million light-years away or so, just announced in the journal Nature. The smaller one, located inside a galaxy known as NGC 3842, is as massive as 9.7 billion suns, and the other, in a galaxy called NGC 4889, is more than twice as large: if you put it on a very large balance, it would take at least 21 billion stars to even things out.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/artic...