Possible final nail in the coffin of the "black hole(TM)" idea:
http://www.universetoday.com/111661/object-g2-still-intact-at-closest-approach-to-galactic-center-astronomers-report/
There is more than a little bit of reason to doubt the idea that we're seeing **** that happened 26,000 years ago in such cases... One version:
The Redneck Theory of Light...
Picture Teddy Roosevelt out on safari on the Serengeti. He calls one of the new guides over to a place where dung of both elephants and lions is to be seen and asks him what he makes of that; there is only one right answer: "Well Bwana, it looks as if some lions have been by here, and some elephants have been by here too..."
The WRONG answer, unacceptable if the man means to keep his job, would go more like "Well, Bwana, it looks as if some MAGICAL ANIMAL with properties of both lions AND elephants has been by here..."
Isn't that, however, exactly what you see when you open a physics book to the page on "photons(TM)"? When you see evidence of both waves and particles, isn't he most reasonable assumption to be had, simply that both waves and particles are present?
Ralph Sansbury describes experiments in which currents generate electrostatic fields which reverse when the currents reverse and notes that this implies that this implies that electrons are not point particles but rather tiny orbital systems in their own right, the charges of the elements of which sum to that of an electron. He notes also that the computed necessary speed of a sub-electron particle (subtron) would get you from here to the Andromeda galaxy in a couple of seconds.
He describes light as an instantaneous force but I don't have an easy time buying the idea of any sort of a force traveling the kinds of distances between us and distant galaxies, and we DO see distant galaxies. Likewise I have no mental picture of any sort of a wave making it here from other galaxies, no matter how much of a "nutrino soup" might extend through space.
Here's what I CAN picture. I can picture energetic processes including fires and plasma discharges throwing off streams of such subtron particles which then traverse the distance across galaxies in seconds as per Sansbury's calculation, and create bow waves through the nutrino soup of our own local environment, i.e. that light amounts to streams of particles and the waves they create. The analogy would be with a machinegun, the light frequency being essentially the rate of fire.
I call this the redneck theory of light. If such a picture should turn out to be valid, it would indicate that light from distant galaxies has only taken a few seconds, and not untold ages, to get to our own local environment.
In other words, scientists might be making a mistake similar to thinking that the sonic crack of bullets flying overhead had traveled from a rifle barrel 800 meters away at the speed of sound. In real life the muzzle report of rifle fire 800 meters away would be barely audible while the sonic crack of bullets, still easily capable of hurting your ears, had arrived at 2700 fps along with the bullets and was being generated locally.