I predicted that there would be these massive objects found in the nearby galaxies. 

 

He brought his ideas together with a bold conceptual leap about where these super-massive black holes would be found in the cosmos. 

 

Typically a large galaxy would have a black hole of the sort of amount of many millions of solar masses. Mass. And these would typically reside in the middles of large galaxies. 

 

It’s a pretty bold prediction. 

 

Yeah, well, I come from a military family. 

 

Lynden-Bell's hypothesis was so radical, it seemed far-fetched. Inside the centre of every large galaxy in the universe lurks a super massive black hole. 

 

If Lynden-Bell was right and every galaxy has a super-massive black hole at its centre, then there should be one right in our own backyard, in the middle of the hundreds of billions of stars that form our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The problem was trying to map our galaxy from the outside when we can only view it from within. Seeing around that obstacle would take ingenuity and some careful observations. 

 

One of the problems of living inside the galaxy like the Milky Way, is that because we are inside it, it's really difficult for us to see what shape it is, how big it is and where in it we actually live.