COSMOLOGISTS are this week beginning to rethink their ideas about how
galaxies form after the discovery that a nearby galaxy lacks a giant black hole
at its core.
Astronomers can detect giant black holes in galaxies by looking for their
effect on the motions of stars close to the galactic nucleus. All of the 30 or
so galaxies previously investigated contain black holes with masses more than a
million times that of the Sun.
But a study of the spiral galaxy M33—to be published in
Science—has drawn a blank. A team led by David Merritt of Rutgers
University…
