The largest known prime number has now been discovered which is 274,207,281-1. This record breaking prime number is around 22 million digits long, which is five million digits longer than the previous largest prime number that was determined in January 2013. 

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Numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one are called prime numbers like  2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on. Searching for this highest known prime number is considered to be evidence of mathematical prowess, garnering interest in testing the powers of supercomputers which does not serve any practical use of the number itself, other than making this a great challenge to solve.

Prime numbers that are written as 2n - 1 for some n or one less than a power of two are called Mersenne primes where they are also the easiest largest prime numbers to determine since they provide numbers to aim for, making this a faster way to test if they are prime numbers. Mersenne primes are named after a French monk, Marin Mersenne who conducted an investigation of their properties some 350 years back. 

In this new world record, this prime was solved by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search which is also a project that connects thousands of computers all over the world to search for prime numbers. This supercomputing project has also been the longest running distributed computing one, that is continuously searching for prime numbers which is also ironically known as GIMPS. After its foundation some 20 years ago, GIMPS has already found 15 of the biggest Mersenne primes numbers.

According to Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri, several computers in the university's laboratory were running GIMPS until one of the computers determined the new highest prime number last September 2015. However, this discovery went unnoticed until a few months after, during a routine maintenance checkup. 

This is the fourth time that Cooper successfully found the newest, largest prime number, where the last record in 2013 was also discovered by him. He will also be eligible to a US $3,000 GIMPS research award where his next big goal is to win the US $150,000 award to find the first 100 million digit prime number that will be given by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.