这个星系中心的黑洞可能是宇宙中最大的黑洞之一

When you drive through some galactic neighborhoods, you definitely want to keep your windows rolled up.

当你开车经过银河系的一些街区时，你肯定想把车窗摇起来。

The heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, may have as many as 20,000 black holes. And all of them are handily eclipsed by the granddaddy of voids, the supermassive Sagittarius A*.

例如，我们银河系的中心可能有多达2万个黑洞。它们都被空洞的鼻祖——超大质量的人马座A*轻易地盖过了。

But some black holes are so vast, they reduce even supermassive things to squintable proportions. In fact, they get their own membership card for being ultramassive black holes.

但有些黑洞太大了，它们甚至能把超大质量的物体缩小到可眯着眼的比例。事实上，它们拥有自己的会员卡，因为它们是超级大黑洞。

Such is Holm 15A*, the light-bending beast that calls the Holmberg 15 galaxy home, a merciful 700 million light-years from where you're currently sitting.

这就是霍尔姆15A*，一种弯曲光线的生物，它把霍尔姆15A*星系称为自己的家，距离你现在坐的地方7亿光年。

Direct measurements of Holm 15A* suggest it clocks in at a whopping 400 solar masses. (Photo: sdecoret/Shutterstock)

While astronomers have noted the likely presence of a black hole in the heart of the elliptical galaxy — indirect measurements even pegged its mass at around 310 billion times that of our sun — a new, more reliable measuring stick has given it even more daunting dimensions.

虽然天文学家已经注意到在椭圆星系的中心可能存在一个黑洞——间接测量甚至认为它的质量大约是我们太阳的3100亿倍——一种新的、更可靠的测量棒已经给了它更令人生畏的尺寸。

Holm 15A* is probably closer to the mass of 400 billion suns, according to scientists who submitted their research this week to The Astrophysical Journal.

霍尔姆15A*可能接近4000亿个太阳的质量，根据本周提交给《天体物理学杂志》的科学家们的研究。

The team, led by Kianusch Mehrgan from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, measured the black hole based on star movements.

由德国马克斯普朗克地外物理研究所的基努什·梅尔根领导的研究小组根据恒星的运动来测量黑洞。

"This is the most massive black hole with a direct dynamical detection in the local universe," the team noted in the paper, which has yet to be reviewed by peers.

“这是在局部宇宙中直接动态探测到的最大的黑洞，”研究小组在论文中指出，该论文尚未得到同行的评论。

By "local'' researchers mean an area that sprawls about a billion light-years in radius — a somewhat necessary stretch of the term, considering the infinite expanse that is the universe.

所谓“局部”研究人员指的是一个半径约为10亿光年的区域——考虑到宇宙的无限大，这是这个术语的必要延伸。

The black hole at the center of the galaxy cluster PKS 0745-19 is another example of the ultramassive variety. (Photo: NASA/CXC/Stanford/Hlavacek-Larrondo, J)

"This is a remarkable observation of an extremely massive black hole at 40 billion solar masses," Andrew Coates, a professor at University College London who wasn't involved in the study, told Newsweek. "This makes it the most massive in our region of the universe, and one of the most massive ever found."

伦敦大学学院教授安德鲁·科茨没有参与这项研究，他在接受《新闻周刊》采访时表示:“这是对一个具有400亿太阳质量的超大质量黑洞的惊人观测。”“这使得它成为宇宙中我们所在区域最大的恒星，也是迄今为止发现的最大恒星之一。”

Let's try imagining Greenland (before all of its ice disappears). You would be able to fit Greenland into Holm 15* about, errr … carry the two over the four … let's see … who are we kidding? Greenland wouldn't even be on the kiddie menu for Holm 15A*.

让我们试着想象格陵兰岛(在所有的冰消失之前)。你可以把格林兰塞进霍尔姆的15*里，呃……把两个带过去……让我看看……我们在开玩笑吧?格陵兰岛甚至不会出现在霍尔姆15A*的儿童菜单上。

There are just some things in this universe that exist on such a grand scale, we simply can't give their girth a human framework.

在这个宇宙中，只有一些东西以如此宏大的规模存在，我们根本无法给它们的周长一个人类的框架。

Holm 15A* is one of those things.

霍尔姆15A*就是其中之一。