00:00What if the universe's biggest monsters aren't as massive as we thought?
00:04A new study has revealed that supermassive black holes
00:07might actually be 10 times smaller than earlier estimates.
00:10Scientists from the University of Southampton
00:13used a groundbreaking tool called gravity
00:15to measure a black hole at the heart of a galaxy
00:1812 billion light-years away.
00:20The result shocked them.
00:22Instead of being impossibly huge,
00:24this so-called cosmic giant was still enormous
00:26at 800 million times the mass of the Sun,
00:29but nowhere near as massive as predicted.
00:31That means astronomers may have been overestimating black holes for years.
00:35The jets of gas and intense radiation from these galactic beasts
00:39may have tricked telescopes into thinking they were bigger than they really are.
00:43If confirmed, this discovery could rewrite our understanding
00:46of how galaxies and black holes grow and evolve.
00:49So maybe the scariest monsters in space just got a little less terrifying.
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