Even more fascinating, the supermassive black hole is about 14% of the total mass of the galaxy.
FORBES: Astronomers Find One Of The Biggest Supermassive Black Holes Yet
The culprit is a staggering flare-up of Markarian 421, a "blazar" that hosts a supermassive black hole.
In the past few years, astronomers have found increasing evidence that it is a supermassive black hole.
For the first time, scientists have detected an oscillating signal of a star being destroyed by a supermassive black hole.
FORBES: Scientists Detect Star Being Devoured By Supermassive Black Hole
The spin measurement, published in Nature, gives precious clues as to how the black hole grew and achieved supermassive status.
Astronomers have measured the rate of spin of a supermassive black hole for the first time - and it is big.
This supermassive black hole lies at the center of galaxy NGC 1277, which is about 220 million light years away from Earth.
FORBES: Astronomers Find One Of The Biggest Supermassive Black Holes Yet
But, as Graham notes, no one knows for certain just how large the innermost high-density region of such a supermassive black hole might be.
FORBES: Why Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole Is Hardly The Source For A 2012 Doomsday 'Killshot'
To astronomers this means one thing - a supermassive black hole.
This finding is at odds with the current thinking about how supermassive black holes form at the center of new galaxies, which makes it of particular interest to astronomers.
FORBES: Astronomers Find One Of The Biggest Supermassive Black Holes Yet
Using their new technique, they estimated the black hole has a mass of some 900 billion trillion trillion tonnes - on the heavy side even in the supermassive stakes.
Blazars are a special case of "active galaxies" - those whose supermassive black holes spray out great quantities of light across the whole electromagnetic spectrum as they feed on surrounding matter.
These early structures are "supermassive" -- perhaps millions of times the mass of our sun -- and most of the light around them doesn't make it out of their galaxies, Schawinski said.
Mr. Scharf really hits his stride when he tells the story of the supermassive black holes that lurk at the heart of many, if not all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
Scientists think it may represent a class of middleweight black holes that are the building blocks for the supermassive black holes lurking at the center of most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
Over the course of the next few hundred million years, the two black holes in NGC 6240, which are about 3, 000 light-years apart, will drift towards one another and merge to form an even larger supermassive black hole.
Fermi has been a tremendous success at examining some of the most high-energy processes in the cosmos, publishing a catalogue filled with details of the spinning neutron stars known as pulsars, and a wide array of "active galactic nuclei" - probably supermassive black holes.
"We are getting a look at the everyday life of a supermassive black hole like never before, " said Frederick Baganoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, who presented the new data on behalf of an international team at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
The list of top discoveries made with Hubble reads like the hit parade of astronomy: a mysterious new "dark energy" causing the accelerating expansion of the universe, distances to other galaxies, the supermassive black holes at their centers, the age of the universe, planet formation around other stars, searches for signs of extraterrestrial life -- and the list goes on.
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