It came as some surprise then, when astronomers spied a supermassive black hole in a relatively quiet neighborhood of the universe. The gravity gobbler has the weight of 18 billion of our suns and is found in a giant elliptical galaxy that should have a much more impressive bulge of stars near its center for a black hole of that size.

"The newly discovered supersized black hole resides in the center of a massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1600, located in a cosmic backwater, a small grouping of 20 or so galaxies," said astronomer Chung-Pei Ma, head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe.

Another way to think of the discovery is that it would be common to find a skyscraper (the black hole) in a city like New York (the surrounding galaxies), but less so in the middle of a small town.