Professor Andrew King from the University of Leicester in the UK explored supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, around which are regions of space where gas settles into an orbiting disc.
This gas can lose energy and fall inwards, feeding the black hole. But these discs are known to be unstable and prone to crumbling into stars.
King calculated how big a black hole would have to be for its outer edge to keep a disc from forming, coming up with the figure of 50 billion solar masses.
The only way it could get larger is if a star happened to fall straight in or another black hole merged with it.
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"The significance of this discovery is that astronomers have found black holes of almost the maximum mass, by observing the huge amount of radiation given off by the gas disc as it falls in," King said.
"The mass limit means that this procedure should not turn up any masses much bigger than those we know, because there would not be a luminous disc," he said.
"One might nevertheless detect it in other ways, for example as it bent light rays passing very close to it (gravitational lensing) or perhaps in future from the gravitational waves that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicts would be emitted as it merged," he added.