New research from a team at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole. The most widely accepted theory of galactic evolution holds that supermassive black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. Until now, there was no reason to imagine that a small cluster like the Large Magellanic Cloud could host one. When x-ray telescopes or observatories have been trained on smaller clusters like the Large Magellanic Cloud, they have found no signatures associated with black hole activity. But then came the hypervelocity stars. For nearly 20 years, astronomers have spotted fast-traveling stars with enough acceleration to be ejected from their own galaxies. While a traditional star moves at about 100 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star travels up to 10 times...
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