At the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud, the nearest big companion galaxy to our own, an invisible conductor is hiding. Astronomers suspect that a supermassive black hole lurks there: an object hundreds of thousands of times more massive than the Sun that gives off no light. But finding it has proved impossible, because it may have stepped off its podium. The galaxy is being tugged by the gravity of the Milky Way, and recently it collided with the Small Magellanic Cloud. Those jolts could have shifted the black hole away from the center.
The map showed that the average position lies just six arcminutes from the center. That is like a coin sitting a couple of centimeters from the middle of a table. The peak of the probability even coincides with the center. So the conductor, in all likelihood, is standing still. Telescopes can now be aimed precisely at that region to look for signs of the black hole, such as the glow of hot gas around it.
The predicted region overlaps with the nuclear star cluster candidate NGC 1916, which makes this cluster a particularly interesting target in the search for an accreting black hole. The distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud is about 49.9 kiloparsecs, and the predicted mean position of the black hole turns out to be roughly 100 parsecs closer to us than the accepted distance to the galaxy.