generalspeaking

Galaxy NGC 1277 is comparatively tiny, just one quarter the size of our Milky Way. There may be a reason for that, however, as scientists have just discovered a massive black hole at the centre of NGC 1277 that makes up 14% of the Galaxy’s entire mass. It is 17 billion times more massive than our sun and is as big as our entire solar system. According to the BBC, it’s the second largest black hole ever discovered* and it has scientists confounded.
“This is a really oddball galaxy,” Karl Gebhardt of The University of Texas at Austin, a team member on the research told Universe Today. “It’s almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.”

Scientists generally posit supermassive black holes only develop in large galaxies, but the finding in NGC 1277 throws a wrench in that.

“This galaxy seems to be very old,” Dr. Remco van den Bosch, the leader of the study told the BBC. “So somehow this black hole grew very quickly a long time ago, but since then that galaxy has been sitting there not forming any new stars or anything else.”

Then again, Dr. van den Bosch says that could be completely wrong and the black hole might be as old as the universe.

“It could just be this thing has been sitting around since the Big Bang and not done much since then,” he told Space.com. “It might be a relic of what star formation and galactic formation looked like at that time.”

The NGC 1277 also fills a huge volume of space, with a diameter of over 300 Astronomical Units (AU). The Earth’s orbit is one AU. While it only takes light 17 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun, it would take almost four days for light to cross this black hole. If, you know, the light wasn’t sucked into it’s gravitational well.

Black holes super compact groups of mass so dense that their gravitational effects warp space-time. They are defined by an “event horizon,” the point around the mass where nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational field. (If someone asks if anything can escape the event horizon of a black hole, tell them that by definition it is impossible — if something can escape, then it isn’t an event horizon.)

You can read the full scientific study of the NGC 1277 black hole in this month’s issue of Nature.

*(The largest black hole ever found, in Galaxy NGC 4889, has an estimated mass 21 billion times that of our sun, however, measuring the mass of black holes so far away has a large margin of error, and the black hole at NGC 4889 may indeed be smaller than the newly discovered one at NGC 1277)