NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a very odd galaxy only a quarter the size of the Milky with a strange population of globular clusters and a bizarre absurdly large supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns, about 14 percent of its host galaxy's mass, compared with the 0.1 percent a normal black hole would represent.
"This is a really oddball galaxy," said study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. "It's almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems."
NGC 1277 is about 240 million light-years away near the Perseus cluster, and appears to be in a state of “arrested development,” an ancient relic once birthed out stars about 1,000 times faster than our own galaxy, but has remained the same for the last 10 billion years or so.
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