All massive galaxies likely have supermassive black holes at their centers,
and the masses of the black holes are known to correlate with properties of the
host galaxy bulge component. Several explanations have been proposed for the
existence of these locally-established empirical relationships; they include
the non-causal, statistical process of galaxy-galaxy merging, direct feedback
between the black hole and its host galaxy, or galaxy-galaxy merging and the
subsequent violent relaxation and dissipation. The empirical scaling relations
are thus important for distinguishing between various theoretical models of
galaxy evolution, and they further form the basis for all black hole mass
measurements at large distances. In particular, observations have shown that
the mass of the black hole is typically 0.1% of the stellar bulge mass of the
galaxy. The small galaxy NGC4486B currently has the largest published fraction
of its mass in a black hole at 11%. Here we report observations of the stellar
kinematics of NGC 1277, which is a compact, disky galaxy with a mass of 1.2 x
10^11 Msun. From the data, we determine that the mass of the central black hole
is 1.7 x 10^10 Msun, or 59% its bulge mass. Five other compact galaxies have
properties similar to NGC 1277 and therefore may also contain over-sized 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 normal black
hole mass scaling relations.Comment: 7 pages. 6 figures. Nature. Animation at
http://www.mpia.de/~bosch/blackholes.htm
