Record breaking super massive black hole discovered

Tim Sayell sends in this eye opener from Yahoo News concerning a record breaking super massive black hole at the center of a nearby galaxy - M87.

From the article:

• The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new - method of determining the size of black holes - suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest.

This new finding may help clear up the size disparity between galaxies extremely far away and those close up. Until recently - distant galaxies which contained quazars - were found to have cores massing about 10 billion solar masses. None of the galaxies relatively close to the Milky Way - seemed to mass anywhere near that of the distant ones. The new finding seems to indicate that most large galaxies contain a super massive black hole, massing on an order comprible with that of distant quazar galaxies.

Yahoo News article