Compact galaxy found to have surprisingly big black hole

Ars Technica : Until now, astronomers had observed that most massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers. However, recent observations of NGC 1277, a relatively small lenticular galaxy 220 million light-years away, indicate that it harbors one of the most massive black holes ever detected. Remco van den Bosch of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues studied high-resolution images captured by the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. Their results appear online in Nature. According to their measurements, NGC 1277’s central black hole has a mass between 14 billion and 20 billion times that of the Sun. Because five other compact galaxies with properties similar to those of NGC1277 have been observed, the researchers are working to determine whether they, too, have supermassive black holes at their centers.