Scary ‘wandering’ black holes have been spotted lurking in parts of the universe where scientists did not expect to see them.

At the centre of many galaxies sit ‘supermassive’ black holes which are vast in size and power.

We don’t know exactly how these gigantic monsters formed way back in the early days of our universe, but scientists have now found ‘an important clue’.

They’ve spotted truly gargantuan holes at the edges of their galaxies, rather than the centre.

This indicates that supermassive behemoths formed and grew as star systems merged over very, very long periods of time.

A total of 13 of these holes were glimpsed at the edge of relatively small dwarf galaxies located about one billion light-years from Earth.

The holes are believed to be 400,000 times the mass of our Sun, which means they are more than 700,000 miles wide.

‘We hope that studying them and their galaxies will give us insights into how similar black holes in the early Universe formed and then grew, through galactic mergers over billions of years, producing the supermassive black holes we see in larger galaxies today, with masses of many millions or billions of times that of the sun,’ said Amy Reines of Montana State University.

The sightings are remarkable because supermassive holes are generally found at the centre of galaxies.

‘The new VLA observations revealed that 13 of these galaxies have strong evidence for a massive black hole that is actively consuming surrounding material. We were very surprised to find that, in roughly half of those 13 galaxies, the black hole is not at the centre of the galaxy, unlike the case in larger galaxies.’

The scientists said this indicates that the galaxies likely have merged with others earlier in their history.

This was predicted in computer simulations which indicated that roughly half of the massive black holes in dwarf galaxies will be found wandering in the outskirts of their celestial homes.

‘This work has taught us that we must broaden our searches for massive black holes in dwarf galaxies beyond their centres to get a more complete understanding of the population and learn what mechanisms helped form the first massive black holes in the early Universe,’ Reines added.

Artist's impression of a black hole feasting on an unlucky star (Image: You Jingchuan, Beijing Planetarium)
Artist’s impression of a black hole feasting on an unlucky star (Image: You Jingchuan, Beijing Planetarium)

Think of the fragile beauty of Earth, its lovely inhabitants and all the other wonders of our beautiful solar system

Now imagine all that being swallowed up by a black hole of truly monstrous proportions.

Not a pretty thought, is it?

But that’s what popped into our minds when we heard that astronomers identified the heaviest black hole in the whole of the known universe.

The beast sits in a galaxy called Holm 15A at the heart of a cluster of other star systems called Abell 85.

This cosmic behemoth has been found to weigh as much as 40 billion suns – which means its greedy maw is more than 70 billion miles wide.

That’s easily big enough to swallow pretty much everything you know and love. The distance from Earth to Pluto is just under four billion miles, meaning the hole would be able to scoff all the sun and all planets as a snack.

Luckily, the dread colossus is 700 million light-years from Earth so there’s absolutely no chance it will ever eat us.

A view of the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies (Image: Matthias Kluge/ USM/ MPE)
A view of the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies (Image: Matthias Kluge/ USM/ MPE)

The mammoth is so ginormous it’s called an ultramassive black hole, which means it’s bigger than even the supermassive varieties.

‘There are only a few dozen direct mass measurements of supermassive black holes, and never before has it been attempted at such a distance,” explains Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physic scientist Jens Thomas, who led a study which weighed the monster.

‘But we already had some idea of the size of the black hole in this particular galaxy, so we tried it.’

The weight was calculated using a sophisticated computer simulation.

Scientists were also able to explain why the centre of the galaxy is relatively faint compared to other galaxies, which is probably down to a process called ‘core scouring’ which ejects stars from the galactic core.

This is sometimes caused by the gravitational disturbances which take place when two black holes merge.

‘This means that most of the stars in the centre must have been expelled due to interactions in previous mergers,’ said Ludwig-Maximilians-University a doctoral student Kianusch Mehrgan, who performed part of the data analysis.