In a discovery that may have yet again set another record in the continual quest of space exploration, a black hole has been discovered that could be the largest known to man.

Astronomers at the University of Texas’s Austin McDonald Observatory have recently used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in their Massive Galaxy Survey to measure—in mass—the newly-discovered and unnamed black hole that was first photographed by Hubble.

Totaling around 17 billion Suns in mass, the black hole resides in a galaxy called NGC 1277, which is located 220 million light-years away in the Perseus constellation. What makes this black hole’s discovery so unique to astronomers is that it takes up an unusual 14% of NGC 1277’s mass. Comparatively, most other black holes only take up about 0.1% of their home galaxy’s mass.

Though the galaxy NGC 1277 is only one tenth the size and mass of the Milky Way, its black hole at the center is “more than 11 times as wide as Neptune’s orbit around the Sun,” according to a news release by Dr. Karl Gebhardt at the University of Texas at Austin.

“This galaxy and several more in the same study could change theories of how black holes and galaxies form and evolve,” the release said.

Calling NGC 1277 an “oddball galaxy,” Gebhardt said that it is almost entirely comprised of the black hole, the first object in a potential new class of galaxy-black hole systems. The shape of the galaxy has also come as peculiar to scientists. While most black holes this size are in the “elliptical” galaxies, this one exists in NGC 1277’s “lenticular”, or lens-shaped, appearance.

Iowa State University Astronomy professor Curtis Struck follows research like the kind that was required to make this discovery. Struck said that to him, it is not the fact that it might be the biggest black hole yet that is interesting, due to that title likely to be broken before long as exploration continues. Rather, Struck said that the fact that such a big black hole resides in such a small galaxy is the most interesting part of this discovery.

Regarding the unusual absence of a bulge (spherical distribution of stars) in NGC 1277, Struck said that there is a usual pattern of relative features in these galaxies.

However, “the new discovery is too far off the average curve. It suggests additional processes, outside the standard theory, are at work in some cases. So now the goal is to find more examples and figure out the driving processes,” he said.

In other words, this galaxy and its black hole center are so abnormal that it could change how we think we understand all galaxies.

A YouTube video was released by Remco van den Bosch of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy on his thoughts and predictions of what this discovery means for learning about galaxies and black holes.