A typical but existentially terrifying feature of almost every galaxy is a monster lurking at its center: A supermassive black hole which can be hundreds or even billions of times the mass of our sun. The supermassive black hole sucks in dust and gas from the surrounding galaxy, leaving an empty spheroid shape right in the middle of the galaxy from which not even light can escape.

Very occasionally, astronomers spot not one but two of these hungry giants moving together, typically when they observe two galaxies merging. But now, researchers have spotted something utterly unprecedented: A galaxy with three supermassive black holes at its heart.

Dr. Peter Weilbacher, one of the researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, underlined the significance of this finding: “Up until now, such a concentration of three supermassive black holes had never been discovered in the universe,” he said.

The shape of our Universe has long been recognized to be flat. But that isn’t the only possibility.

Born shortly after the Big Bang, these cosmic monsters have perplexed astronomers for years. A new study may shed light on their origins.

Astronomers believe that new measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang.

This means that the Hubble constant (H0) — the measure of the current expansion rate of the Universe, named after Edwin Hubble, the man who first observed said expansion — needs adjustment from its current figure of ~2 X 10-¹⁸ s-¹.

Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate, says of the disparity between old calculations and these new findings: “This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected.”