It is large enough to swallow our entire solar system and weighs the same as 6.8 billion suns.

Event its event horizon - the edge from within nothing can escape, not even light - is four times as large as the orbit of Neptune.

This black hole M87, the largest identified such phenomenon identified so far anywhere.

Scientists used a specially adapted telescope in Hawaii to observe it and discovered that it was more than twice as heavy as had been previously thought, catapulting it into the record books.

It was observed in M87, by far the largest and most distant galaxy in the nearby universe, some 50million light years away. Researchers said that it may have formed as a result of hundreds of smaller black holes merging into one at some point in the past. As a point of comparison, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is 1,000 times smaller. [ DAILYMAIL UK ]