The black hole inside the small, compact galaxy known as NGC 1277, located about 250 million light years away in the constellation Perseus, weighs in at 17 billion times the mass of the sun.
In comparison, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is equal to the mass of about 4 million suns.
Typically, black holes account for 0.1 percent of a galaxy's stellar bulge. Until now, the galaxy with the proportionally largest black hole was NCG 4486B, which has a black hole accounting for 11 percent of the combined mass of the central stars.
How 1277's black hole came to be so large is mystery.
"We didn't expect these systems to exist at all, but because the stars move so incredibly fast in the centers of these objects, we know these big black holes exist in these small galaxies," astronomer Remco van den Bosch, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
"Now that we have found that these crazy kind of galaxies exist, we want to know how they form and how (un-)common they are," he wrote.
However the galaxy and its black hole came to cohabitate, they've been together and in relative peace for a long, long time.
The galaxy has a flat disk, indicating its stars are, and have been, relatively undisturbed for eons. If the black hole had been feeding, the flux of infalling material would have triggered new star formation, van den Bosch said.
"This black hole -- and galaxy -- must have formed in its final form fairly quickly after the big bang. We do not have any information on whether the black hole formed before the galaxy, but most likely it happened at the same time," van den Bosch wrote.
Read more at Discovery News
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