Astronomers find a tiny, super-massive black hole
Astronomers discover uper-massive black holes sit at the centre of most galaxies, and astronomers are still figuring out how, exactly, they form.
It’s the biggest oxymoron ever: An itty-bitty super-massive black hole.
The smallest super-massive black hole ever found in the centre of a galaxy, as a matter of fact.
This is admittedly confusing. A tiny super-massive black hole?
Why bother calling it super-massive, then? Why bother with adjectives? Have words lost all meaning?
Black holes come in at least two flavours: stellar and super-massive.
A stellar black hole forms when a huge star collapses in on itself, and those black holes will be just a few times more massive than our sun.
Super-massive black holes sit at the centre of most galaxies, and astronomers are still figuring out how, exactly, they form.
Super-massive black holes are typically at least 100,000 times as massive as the sun.
This newly discovered black hole, described in a study published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, is just 50,000 times as massive as the sun, and 100 times less massive than the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.
The black hole sits in the centre of a dwarf galaxy some 340 million light years from Earth.
Because the galaxy and its black hole are so small, researchers are hoping they might share similarities with young galaxies.
“These little galaxies can serve as analogs to galaxies in the earlier universe,” first author Vivienne Baldassare, a grad. student at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.
“For galaxies like our Milky Way, we don’t know what it was like in its youth.
“By studying how galaxies like this one are growing and feeding their black holes and how the two are influencing each other, we could gain a better understanding of how galaxies were forming in the early universe.”
The researchers have already noted one interesting finding: the tiny black hole seems to be consuming matter at around the same rate as its much more massive cousins. That could mean that super-massive black holes grow steadily throughout their lifetimes.
They hope that further research will help them puzzle out how this little super-massive black holes and its cousins, whatever their size, came to be.
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