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Scientists baffled by gargantuan black hole - latimes.com
Astronomers on the hunt for supermassive black holes have discovered one so monstrous that its mass dominates the central hub of its galaxy in a way that defies scientists' expectations about how typical black holes behave.
Described in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, the black hole may push theorists to revamp their ideas of how these mysterious structures grow and evolve.
Astrophysicists said they were scratching their heads at how thoroughly this gargantuan black hole — seated in the galaxy NGC 1277, about 220 million light-years away — hogs its galactic bed.
Supermassive black holes typically account for just 0.1% of the mass in a galaxy's stellar bulge, the cluster of older stars huddled around the center. This particular black hole, by contrast, takes up 59% of that central mass, shattering the previous record of 11%.
"This is an oddball," said Chung-Pei Ma, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley who was not involved in the research. "It's a very big black hole for a small galaxy — that's the most surprising part. It's a very interesting discovery."
An international team of scientists documented the giant black hole while peering at the centers of about 800 of the biggest galaxies in the local universe, using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory. The assumption was that the biggest galaxies would hold the biggest black holes, which is what the researchers were really looking for.
