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When it's feeding, a giant black hole creates a bright burning gas disk around it and then for some reason, it stops feeding, leaving a dark, deadly core lurking menacingly in the center of the galaxy. And one of these dark, silent monsters had been found in our neighboring galaxy.
The discovery of a massive black hole lurking so close to us made headlines around the world. But many scientists found the news impossible to believe. They didn't think the evidence was good enough for such an extreme idea. Even the Nukers themselves began to have doubts.
There is always the danger that instead of being a black hole, it's a dense cluster of something else that's dark, that's not a black hole.
I thought there was a fair chance that we'd made some terrible bone-headed mistake and that somebody within a year was gonna write a paper and show that we were a bunch of idiots and we would feel terrible about it.
To convince the skeptics, they needed to find more supermassive black holes in many more galaxies. For this they needed to look further into space. So they turned to Hubble Space Telescope. From 1994, Hubble began a systematic survey of the centers of distant galaxies, searching for the telltale signature of stars speeding around a supermassive black hole.
Astronomers started by looking at an active galaxy, M87. As expected, it had a giant feeding black hole shooting a great jet of energy into space. But it was when the search broadened out to include inactive galaxies as well that something incredible happened.
lurk: be present in a latent or barely discernible state
boneheaded: stupid, foolish
jet: a rapid stream of liquid or gas forced out of a small opening
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