Huge Black Hole Sets Record

At our sister site SPACE.com you'll find more astronomy news than you can shake a cosmic yardstick this week, as Andrea Thompson reports from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena. Among the cool findings on Day 1 of the meeting:

The most massive black hole ever. It's a whopper at 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun and could help astronomers unravel a mystery about the incredible masses seen in faraway galaxies, which are seen as they were forming in the early universe.

Dark and mysterious explosions. Some of the most powerful explosions in the universe are invisible. But astronomers are a sneaky bunch. By monitoring X-rays and gamma rays, they're able to see what's going on.

Astronomers also announced a step toward a better measuring system for the expansion of the universe, a rather out-of-control phenomenon (galaxies are racing away from each other at an ever-increasing pace, oh my!). Separately, a new way was found to find absolute distances to faraway cosmic objects.

Check in at SPACE.com all week for more news from the AAS meeting. We can't tell you what else is coming, but we can tell you some of it is really cool.