How big can they get? What’s the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide? We’ve never seen them directly… yet we know they are there… Lurking within dense star clusters… Or wandering the dust lanes of the galaxy…. Where they prey on stars… Or swallow planets whole. Our Milky Way may harbor millions of these black holes… the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there’s evidence of something even more ominous… A breed of black holes that have reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. It has taken a new era in astronomy to find them… High-tech instruments in space tuned to sense high-energy forms of light — x-rays and gamma rays — that are invisible to our eyes. New precision telescopes equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere… and see to the far reaches of the universe. Peering into distant galaxies, astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time can be shattered by eruptions so vast they boggle the mind. We are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe around us. That understanding recently took a leap forward. A team operating at the Subaru Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano looked out to one of the deepest reaches of the universe… And captured a beam of light that had taken nearly 13 billion years to reach us. It was a messenger from a time not …
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Tags: Black, Holes, Largest, Universe