[1] Formation scenarios for BCGs include: The study of accretion populations in BCGs[2] has cast doubt over this theory and astronomers have seen no evidence of cooling flows in radiative cooling clusters.
It has been shown that the orbit decay of cluster galaxies is not effective enough to account for the growth of BCGs.
[6] The merging model is now generally accepted as the most likely one,[7] but recent observations are at odds with some of its predictions.
For example, it has been found that the stellar mass of BCGs was assembled much earlier than the merging model predicts.
The different parametrizations of the light profile of BCG's, as well as the faintness of the diffuse envelope lead to discrepancies in the reported values of the sizes of these objects.