Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Nature. 2011 Dec 8;480(7376):215-8. doi: 10.1038/nature10636.
Observational work conducted over the past few decades indicates that all massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres. Although the luminosities and brightness fluctuations of quasars in the early Universe suggest that some were powered by black holes with masses greater than 10 billion solar masses, the remnants of these objects have not been found in the nearby Universe. The giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 hosts the hitherto most massive known black hole, which has a mass of 6.3 billion solar masses. Here we report that NGC 3842, the brightest galaxy in a cluster at a distance from Earth of 98 megaparsecs, has a central black hole with a mass of 9.7 billion solar masses, and that a black hole of comparable or greater mass is present in NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster (at a distance of 103 megaparsecs). These two black holes are significantly more massive than predicted by linearly extrapolating the widely used correlations between black-hole mass and the stellar velocity dispersion or bulge luminosity of the host galaxy. Although these correlations remain useful for predicting black-hole masses in less massive elliptical galaxies, our measurements suggest that different evolutionary processes influence the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes.
过去几十年的观测工作表明，所有大质量星系的中心都有超大质量黑洞。尽管早期宇宙中类星体的光度和亮度波动表明，其中一些类星体的能量来源于质量超过 100 亿个太阳质量的黑洞，但在附近的宇宙中尚未发现这些物体的残余物。梅西耶 87 号巨型椭圆星系拥有迄今为止已知的最大质量黑洞，其质量为 63 亿个太阳质量。在这里，我们报告说，距离地球 9800 万秒差距的一个星系团中最亮的星系 NGC 3842 中心有一个质量为 97 亿个太阳质量的黑洞，而在距离地球 10300 万秒差距的后发座星系团中最亮的星系 NGC 4889 中也存在一个质量相当或更大的黑洞。这两个黑洞的质量远远超过了通过广泛使用的黑洞质量与宿主星系恒星速度弥散或星系核亮度之间的线性关系外推所预测的质量。尽管这些相关性仍然可用于预测较小质量的椭圆星系中的黑洞质量，但我们的测量结果表明，不同的演化过程会影响最大星系及其黑洞的生长。
