Astronomers have discovered the two most massive black holes known in the Universe, Nature News Blog reports. With masses on the order of 10 billion times that of the Sun, these gravitational monsters could represent a missing link: the first known remnants of the brightest quasars that lit the cosmos only a billion or so years after the Big Bang.

Ref.: Nicholas J. McConnell et al., Two ten-billion-solar-mass black holes at the centres of giant elliptical galaxies, Nature, 2011 [DOI: 10.1038/nature10636]