Well, except that the radius of influence of the supermassive black hole is very small. The vast majority of the galaxy doesn't even know it exists (at least not directly). To get the matter to "spiral down" into the "drain" (smbh), the matter has to lose a whole bunch of angular momentum (orbital energy), and when a whole bunch of mass is dumped at a rapid rate (solar masses per year), you get an active galaxy or quasar. There are a variety of mechanisms for doing this, but to my knowledge there isn't any agreement as to this mechanism(s).

It is possible that the smbh formed in the collapsed central mass concentration of the orginal dark matter halo, before much of the star formation during the early days of the galaxy's formation. One thing that is interesting is that the mass of the smbh somehow knows about mass of the spheroidal star distribution - and this would seem to corroborate the opening statement of this paragraph. There are lots of recent papers about this at the astro-ph preprint site:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/astro-ph/



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Spaceman Spiff on 2002-11-18 22:32 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Spaceman Spiff on 2002-11-22 11:51 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Spaceman Spiff on 2002-11-22 11:52 ]</font>