Biggest Black Holes and Cosmic Monsters | Discovery Channel

Astronomers have identified a mammoth black hole weighing as much as 12 billion suns.

It's not the biggest black hole ever found, but it's astonishingly young. The giant appears to have swelled to its enormous size only 875 million years after the big bang, when the universe was just 6 percent of its current age. That's a surprise, astronomers report Wednesday in the journal Nature, because giant black holes are thought to grow relatively slowly by vacuuming up gas and even stars that venture too close.

"How do you build such a big black hole in such a short time?" asks Xue-Bing Wu of China's Peking University, lead author of the study.