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LiveScience
LiveScience
Ben Turner

'Cosmic Horseshoe' may contain black hole the size of 36 billion suns — one of the largest ever detected

A Hubble Space Telescope image of LRG 3-757, known as the "Cosmic Horseshoe".

Astronomers have discovered an enormous black hole the size of 36 billion suns lurking within the "Cosmic Horseshoe." The behemoth object is one of the largest black holes ever detected.

First discovered in 2007, the Cosmic Horseshoe is a system of two galaxies located in the constellation Leo. Images of the system show a halo of light surrounding the foreground galaxy, LRG 3-757. This phenomenon, known as an Einstein ring, occurs when the significant mass of the galaxy warps and magnifies light from an even more distant galaxy behind it.

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