With no more than three weeks after being claimed the largest black hole in history, the Messier 33 black hole (M33 X-7) and its accompanying star is belittled by a much larger contender. The new black hole is at least 24 times the mass of the Sun (compared with M33 X-7's 16-fold mass) and resides in galaxy IC 10, 1.8 million light years away from Earth.

Discovered by a team led by Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the "stellar-mass" black hole (stellar-mass meaning the black hole comes in sizes of stars) may even have as much as 33 times a typical solar mass. That usually equates to impressive (and powerful) gravitational pull.

Galaxy IC 10 was observed as far as a year ago, and it was found that the black hole took in much of its accompanying star's gases. The material would be lost to this universe, but before it did, the gases heated up and emitted X-rays that were observable from Earth.

"We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized," said Prestwich. She later added that there's a possibility that even more stellar-mass black holes exist in other galaxies which formed during the Milky Way's early days. This new find will be published in an unnamed paper on November 1.