CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Scientists have found the biggest black
holes known to exist -- each 10 billion times the size of our
sun. A team led by astronomers at the University of California,
Berkeley, discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of
elliptical galaxies more than 300 million light years away.
That's relatively close on the galactic scale. The previous
black hole record-holder is as large as 6 billion suns. In
research released Monday by the journal Nature, the scientists
suggest these black holes may be the leftovers of quasars that
crammed the early universe. They are similar in mass to young
quasars, they said, and have been well hidden until now. They
used ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble Space
Telescope for the job, as well as supercomputers in Texas. A
black hole is formed by the collapse of a super-size star. It's
a region where nothing, not even light, can escape. Most if not
all galaxies are believed to have black holes at their center;
the bigger the galaxy, it seems