JUST how big can a black hole grow? Two astronomers reckon they have worked out the answer: colossal black holes with a mass of up to 50 billion suns could be lurking out there - but that's the limit.
Giant black holes sit at the cores of virtually all galaxies, and are thought to have grown from smaller seed black holes that swallowed lots of matter. The biggest well-measured one resides in the galaxy Messier 87 and has the mass of 3 billion suns, a measurement based on the speed of the gas swirling around it.
Even bigger black holes are waiting to be found, say Priya Natarajan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ezequiel Treister of the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile.
In a study to appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the pair examined the "feeding habits" and growth of ...
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