snip~
One of the biggest black holes ever found sits in a cosmic backwater, like a towering skyscraper in a small town.

Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole containing 17 billion times the mass of the sun — only slightly smaller than the heftiest known black hole, which weighs in at a maximum of 21 billion solar masses — at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600.

That's a surprise, because NGC 1600, which lies 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, belongs to an average-size galaxy group, and the monster black holes discovered to date tend to be found in dense clusters of galaxies. So researchers may have to rethink their ideas about where gigantic black holes reside, and how many of them might populate the universe, study team members said.


more @
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/scientists-find-gigantic-black-hole-way-out-cosmic-backwater-n551881

It's getting weird again. What was thought to be known is once again unknown. Recently it was discovered that Dark Matter is not distributed across the cosmos in direct correlation to large concentrations of matter. What that tells physicists is that Dark Matter does not interact with conventional matter (baryonic matter) as strongly as thought at first. There is gross divergence between distributions of baryonic matter and Dark Matter throughout the cosmos.

So this also tells physicists that they may have to change the model of how Dark Matter interacts with itself and with the Cosmic Constant (all-pervasive anti-gravity field) which is causing the universe to expand.

http://www.universetoday.com/60422/astronomers-find-black-holes-do-not-absorb-dark-matter/ 

It's possible that Dark Matter "particles" interact with each other in exotic ways not seen in other particles and which are not easily observable or definable with current technology.

Einstein used to say that he saw Humanity as wading into the shallow surf of an ocean of knowledge and that the sum total of what we currently know of the Universe is a minute fraction of what is knowable. When you think about what that implies, it's fairly mind-blowing.

Quote from: Late-For-Lunch on April 06, 2016, 09:28:40 PM
It's getting weird again. What was thought to be known is once again unknown. Recently it was discovered that Dark Matter is not distributed across the cosmos in direct correlation to large concentrations of matter. What that tells physicists is that Dark Matter does not interact with conventional matter (baryonic matter) as strongly as thought at first. There is gross divergence between distributions of baryonic matter and Dark Matter throughout the cosmos.

So this also tells physicists that they may have to change the model of how Dark Matter interacts with itself and with the Cosmic Constant (all-pervasive anti-gravity field) which is causing the universe to expand.

http://www.universetoday.com/60422/astronomers-find-black-holes-do-not-absorb-dark-matter/ 

It's possible that Dark Matter "particles" interact with each other in exotic ways not seen in other particles and which are not easily observable or definable with current technology.

Einstein used to say that he saw Humanity as wading into the shallow surf of an ocean of knowledge and that the sum total of what we currently know of the Universe is a minute fraction of what is knowable. When you think about what that implies, it's fairly mind-blowing.

Einstein is correct, though I think his analogy is a bit generous.
We have yet to reach the ocean, we only suspect it's existence due to onshore winds and salt in the air and an increase in humidity.
No, mankind can merely speculate on what he has yet to see.

Quote from: walkstall on April 06, 2016, 01:44:32 PM
snip~
One of the biggest black holes ever found sits in a cosmic backwater, like a towering skyscraper in a small town.

Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole containing 17 billion times the mass of the sun — only slightly smaller than the heftiest known black hole, which weighs in at a maximum of 21 billion solar masses — at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600.

That's a surprise, because NGC 1600, which lies 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, belongs to an average-size galaxy group, and the monster black holes discovered to date tend to be found in dense clusters of galaxies. So researchers may have to rethink their ideas about where gigantic black holes reside, and how many of them might populate the universe, study team members said.


more @
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/scientists-find-gigantic-black-hole-way-out-cosmic-backwater-n551881

I know this might be to complicated for the brilliance working at NASA these days, reinventing the wheel and what not.

But what's the mystery here? Really, seriously? Why are these scientists walking around in such a quandary, given what we know black holes do.

Namely eat stars.

To me it seems the simplest answer for why you'd find not just a black hole, but a super giant hefty one like this.

In a  region that's not really all that populated with stars (at least not any longer).

Is this. The black hole ate the stars and grew to the huge size we now see sitting there.

Remember the light/radiation we use to detect these things.

Is travelling through space as well as time, to get to us.

By the time it does, what we are seeing already happened thousands if not millions or billions of years ago.

For all we know the thing kept right on binging and ate the entire galaxy that was there.

Just, the light from that happening, hasn't reached us yet.

I can understand how that seems strange. My understanding of why this is odd is that black holes generally spew out a lot of matter and energy into the general vicinity because the accretion disk that surrounds them hurls a lot of objects which approach the event horizon out away from the center and it never returns because it gets caught up in the interstellar medium of other systems outside the pull of the black hole.

Also there is generally a lot of new-star formation around ancient black holes because of this same tendency for there to be a lot of matter (dust and start systems) in the general area of the singularity. This is similar to the phenomenon of how huge volcanos distribute tons and tons of material in the surround terrain after an explosion.

This makes it appear that there was a massive volcanic explosion but it didn't spew out any lava or boulders or debris. It just sucked up everything and everything else in the entire area. That is unusual but not necessarily inexplicable.

It is simply another example of how science can't really explain much, it only comes up with approximations and plausible scenarios which then must await more data and theoretical confirmation.