A supermassive black hole in an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy.

Ultra-compact dwarf galaxies are among the densest stellar systems in the Universe. These systems have masses of up to 2 × 10(8) solar masses, but half-light radii of just 3-50 parsecs. Dynamical mass estimates show that many such dwarfs are more massive than expected from their luminosity. It remains unclear whether these high dynamical mass estimates arise because of the presence of supermassive black holes or result from a non-standard stellar initial mass function that causes the average stellar mass to be higher than expected. Here we report adaptive optics kinematic data of the ultra-compact dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1 that show a central velocity dispersion peak exceeding 100 kilometres per second and modest rotation. Dynamical modelling of these data reveals the presence of a supermassive black hole with a mass of 2.1 × 10(7) solar masses. This is 15 per cent of the object's total mass. The high black hole mass and mass fraction suggest that M60-UCD1 is the stripped nucleus of a galaxy. Our analysis also shows that M60-UCD1's stellar mass is consistent with its luminosity, implying a large population of previously unrecognized supermassive black holes in other ultra-compact dwarf galaxies.

An over-massive black hole in the compact lenticular galaxy NGC 1277.

Most massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres, and the masses of the black holes are believed to correlate with properties of the host-galaxy bulge component. Several explanations have been proposed for the existence of these locally established empirical relationships, including the non-causal, statistical process of galaxy-galaxy merging, direct feedback between the black hole and its host galaxy, and galaxy-galaxy merging and the subsequent violent relaxation and dissipation. The empirical scaling relations are therefore important for distinguishing between various theoretical models of galaxy evolution, and they furthermore form the basis for all black-hole mass measurements at large distances. Observations have shown that the mass of the black hole is typically 0.1 per cent of the mass of the stellar bulge of the galaxy. Until now, the galaxy with the largest known fraction of its mass in its central black hole (11 per cent) was the small galaxy NGC 4486B. Here we report observations of the stellar kinematics of NGC 1277, which is a compact, lenticular galaxy with a mass of 1.2 × 10(11) solar masses. From the data, we determine that the mass of the central black hole is 1.7 × 10(10) solar masses, or 59 per cent of its bulge mass. We also show observations of five other compact galaxies that have properties similar to NGC 1277 and therefore may also contain over-massive black holes. It is not yet known if these galaxies represent a tail of a distribution, or if disk-dominated galaxies fail to follow the usual black-hole mass scaling relations.