Comet Enthusiast

The black hole at the center of galaxy M87 fifty million light-years away is the most massive black hole for which a precise mass has been measured -6.6 billion solar masses. Using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of astronomers calculated the black hole’s mass, which is vastly larger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, which is about 4 million solar masses. Astronomer Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas, Austin, said that the black hole’s event horizon,  20 billion km across “could swallow our solar system whole.”