In the movie The Neverending Story a terrifying Nothing is destroying the land of Fantastica. Black holes have a bit of the Nothing about them. Over the last 75 years, black holes have transformed from theoretical objects, to observable celestial events, to some of the largest, most powerful objects in the known universe. And they just keep getting bigger. Here’s more from Astronomy Now:

…using a technique known as gravitational lensing. Using a supercomputer to analyse the light from a background galaxy, they determined the best explanation was the gravity of an ultramassive black hole at the heart of a foreground galaxy that warped the light on its way to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery,” said Durham University’s James Nightingale, lead author of a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

See and learn more!