The story is in the discovery of massive black holes in the centers of dwarf galaxies by Amy Reines of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Now, we are quite familiar with the story that all massive galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centers. In fact, the bigger the galaxy’s central bulge, the bigger the supermassive black hole, or SMBH. There seems to be a definite link between the evolution of galaxies and the evolution of their central black holes.
An outstanding question is: how do these supermassive black holes form? Many millions or billions of “regular” mass black holes would fit inside one SMBH, but its hard to imagine this ever happening realistically in the Universe. It is likely, however, that SMBHs started as simply Massive Black Holes (MBHs) during the early days of the Universe, either as gas clouds collapsed catastrophically or supermassive stars somehow formed massive seed black holes. These seed black holes are far too distant to observe with current capabilities though.
And so now we have many dwarf galaxies harboring central massive black holes as well as their larger counterparts, and that does indeed represent a paradigm-shift in what we know about black hole and galaxy evolution.
