Rogue Supermassive Black Hole Found in Unlikely Corner of Cosmos

— -- Scientists have discovered the rebel of black holes: A supermassive black hole weighing 17 billion suns, lurking in a part of the cosmos where such entities are rarely observed.

The largest supermassive black holes are typically found at the center of large galaxies in areas of the universe with other closely neighboring galaxies. What makes this new discovery so unusual is it was found at the center of a galaxy in a sparse area of the universe, located 200 million light-years from Earth, according to NASA.

The largest known black hole weighs 21 billion suns and is located in the Coma galaxy cluster, an area that is home to more than one thousand galaxies, according to NASA. The observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii have led astronomers to believe there could be more black holes also located in lesser populated areas of the universe.

The newly-discovered black hole is located in NGC 1600, an elliptical galaxy grouped with about just 20 or so other galaxies, making it a sparsely populated area, by astronomical standards. The black hole's size is also a mystery. One theory is it may be the product of a merger between two black holes, occurring when two galaxies collide and give birth to a larger black hole.

"To become this massive, the black hole would have had a very voracious phase during which it devoured lots of gas," Chung-Pei Ma, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer and lead researcher, said in a statement on Wednesday. Ma and her team reported the discovery this week in the journal "Nature."

The black hole was detected by measuring the velocity of the stars surrounding it, which are affected by the black hole's gravity. Astronomers calculated the velocity of the stars and determined the black hole's mass.