SMBH in Perseus

[shinok]

Just the other week i was blown away when i found out that they discovered the largest Super Massive Black Hole (ULASJ1234+0907) with 10 billion times the mass of our sun, now they have just discovered one at 17 billion times the mass of our sun residing at the center of NGC1277. A normal (If there is such a thing ) only usualy has about 0.1% the mass of it's host galaxy, this bad boy has a staggering 14%, Trully Awesome and completely mind boggling, what are peoples veiws on how this came to be??????

[Matt Scunthorpe]

Maybe the galaxy use to be alot bigger and it has fallen into the black hole and increased its size. Or a number of black holes merged into one.

Or, we just havent found enough black holes, this one might be quite small compared to some that may be out there.

[J_M_Franklin]

Or perhaps the mass is not a black hole at all but something altogether different and only gives the appearance of such an object due to the massive distance...I am not convinced that all these "massive black holes" are actually there, but i accept I am in the minority and could likely be wrong..

[George Jones]

Or perhaps the mass is not a black hole at all but something altogether different and only gives the appearance of such an object due to the massive distance...I am not convinced that all these "massive black holes" are actually there, but i accept I am in the minority and could likely be wrong..

We should know within a few years. I highly recommend the article "Portrait of a Black Hole",

https://www.cfa.harv...loeb/sciam2.pdf,

from the December 2009 issue of Scientific American. The February 2012 issue of Sky & Telescope has a more recent but less detailed article on this, "Einstein's Shadow".

This is very exciting, because it will give observational tests of images predicted by strong-field general relativity near event horizons..

[J_M_Franklin]

We should know within a few years. I highly recommend the article "Portrait of a Black Hole",

https://www.cfa.harv...loeb/sciam2.pdf,

from the December 2009 issue of Scientific American. The February 2012 issue of Sky & Telescope has a more recent but less detailed article on this, "Einstein's Shadow".

This is very exciting, because it will give observational tests of images predicted by strong-field general relativity near event horizons..

Thanks George, have read those articles and I do understand the physics behind singularities and event horizons, I am simply concerned that researchers are accepting anything with mass that they cannot observe directly is automatically labelled a black hole. It likely is, but nature is a strange beast and has a very strange sense of humour, many time in history we have thought we found B when in fact we found H instead simply masquerading as B...

For me the evidence is not conclusive, i am sure it will be in time, certainly for some sources/Objects...butI also feel that we may find other objects that we never even thought of or that we thought could not be as massive..