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One of the most pernicious mysteries in astronomy right now is easy to state but proving ridiculously hard to answer: How do supermassive black holes form?
When you think of black holes, you probably think of them as agents of cosmic chaos, grabbing everything around them and gobbling it down, a force for destruction on a galactic scale. That's not entirely untrue, but it is unfair. They can be forces for creation, too.
Soon multiple observatories on and above the world were peering at it, measuring its light and taking the measure of this event. Its position on the sky corresponded to a somewhat ordinary galaxy about 730 million light years from Earth. But, like all decent-sized galaxies, this one has a supermassive black hole in its center. The exact mass of the black hole isn't well constrained, but is 5 to perhaps 30 million times the mass of the Sun. This actually puts it on the small end of such beasts; many are billions of times the mass of the Sun. Still, it's not something you want to toy with. But ...