MEXICO: Here’s a cosmic contradiction: A tiny supermassive black hole. Astronomers using the Magellan II telescope in Chile and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered the smallest supermassive black hole yet found at the center of a dwarf galaxy.
The findings, published by the Astrophysical Journal Letters, could help scientists better understand the evolution of some of the earliest galaxies – and the black holes at their hearts.
Black holes are such dense, massive objects that even light cannot escape. They come in two main types: the “stellar-mass” black holes, which are the remains of dead stars that were several times the mass of the sun; and the supermassive black holes, which are thought to sit at the center of every large galaxy and that can weigh millions or even billions of solar masses.
But this newly found supermassive black hole, at the center of a dwarf galaxy called RGG 118, holds a mere 50,000 suns’ worth of mass – on the order of 100,000 times smaller than some of its oversized peers. (The supermassive black hole in the middle of our own Milky Way, for the sake of comparison, holds between 4 million and 5 million solar masses, and it’s not even a serious heavyweight.
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