Article content continued

Then again, Dr. van den Bosch says that could be completely wrong and the black hole might be as old as the universe.

“It could just be this thing has been sitting around since the Big Bang and not done much since then,” he told Space.com. “It might be a relic of what star formation and galactic formation looked like at that time.”

The NGC 1277 also fills a huge volume of space, with a diameter of over 300 Astronomical Units (AU). The Earth’s orbit is one AU. While it only takes light 17 minutes for light to cross the diameter of the Earth’s orbit, it would take almost four days for light to cross this black hole. If, you know, the light wasn’t pulled into the gravity well. (Which it would be. Because it’s a black hole.)

Black holes super compact groups of mass so dense that their gravitational effects warp space-time. They are defined by an “event horizon,” the point around the mass where nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational field. (If someone asks if anything can escape the event horizon of a black hole, tell them that by definition it is impossible — if something can escape, then it isn’t an event horizon.)

You can read the full scientific study of the NGC 1277 black hole in this month’s issue of Nature.