The black hole at the center of our galaxy is about four million
times as massive as the Sun, and millions of miles across — a
monster you want to stay well clear of. Yet compared to the
black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 4889, the one in the
Milky Way is sort of like a hole dug by a pill bug compared to
the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. NGC 4889 is a giant elliptical
galaxy — a football-shaped galaxy that’s much larger and heavier
than the Milky Way. A couple of months ago, a team of
astronomers reported that the black hole at the center of NGC
4889 is probably a record breaker. It appears to be about 5,000
times more massive than the black hole at the center of the
Milky Way. The astronomers used a telescope in Hawaii to measure
the speeds of stars at different points near the center of the
galaxy. They then plugged those measurements into mathematical
models, and ran the models on supercomputers at the University
of Texas. The speeds of the stars reveal the mass of the central
black hole. The resul