With the holiday season approaching, and everyone looking forward to devouring more than they should, comes an announcement from the astronomy community of an even bigger devourer...

Astronomers have new data from the depths of outer space, far past the edges of our own galaxy, to where there exists a galaxy which contains at its center a black hole thought to be 10 billion times more massive than our own sun. For comparison  our own Milky Way galaxy orbits a black hole which is a measly 4 million solar masses.

Of course black holes cannot be directly observed, since they devour all light as well as anything else that comes near to them, but they can be weighed by looking at the orbital speeds of nearby stars. The faster the stars move, the heavier the black hole.

But this discovery also raises new questions about how a black hole can grow to such a size. Considering that the Universe itself is only 14 billion years old (and for some of that time no black holes would have even existed)  this means that the black hole  observed must have been devouring one sun every year since the birth of the Universe. In our own galaxy you couldn't even visit one star per year even travelling at close to the speed of light!

So how did this black hole get so big? I am sure that astrophysicists are even now pondering that very question, and the answer may very well lead to yet another huge discovery.