After this process of stellar formation ran its course, NGC 1277 was left populated with metal-rich stars that are about 7 billion years older than the Sun.

[4][5] However, observations with Hubble Space Telescope indicate that NGC 1277 lacks metal-poor globular clusters, suggesting that it has accreted little mass over its lifetime and supporting the relic galaxy hypothesis.

[4][5] One group made observations using the Gemini Near Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer to better determine the mass of the black hole at the center of NGC 1277.

More recently, a new group[5] made observations using the larger Keck Telescope with superior spatial resolution, and calculated that a black hole with mass 1.2×109 M☉ fits best.

Moreover, this value is an order of magnitude smaller than first reported by van den Bosch,[8] and was noted to probably be an upper limit due to the edge-on rotating disk in NGC 1277.