The nearby dwarf galaxy Segue 1 is exceptionally faint for its mass, which has puzzled astronomers almost since its discovery. A new paper proposes this could be because it hosts a ridiculously oversized supermassive black hole, relative to Segue 1’s population of stars. They have calculated that a black hole about 450,000 times the mass of the Sun provides the best fit with observations. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The Milky Way is surrounded by many much smaller satellite galaxies. Although these are nearby, at least by the standards of galaxies, the only two we can see with the naked eye are the Magellanic Clouds . Bright parts of our own galaxy obscure some, but most are just too small and faint.

Segue 1

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