Type

Supermassive

Location

in the constellation Virgo

Finder Chart

Distance

100 million light-years (31.6 megaparsecs)

Mass

500 million to 1.2 billion times the mass of the Sun

Size

Diameter range from the size of Saturn's orbit around the Sun to the size of Neptune's orbit

Discovery Methods

• Measuring the motions of gas

1

A disk of dark dust encircles the possible supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4261 in this 1992 view from Hubble Space Telescope. The disk, at the center of the image, spans about 800 light-years. [NASA/ Walter Jaffe (Leiden Observatory)/Holland Ford/JHU/STScI]

This document was last modified: January 23, 2006.