The smallest supermassive black hole ever found in the center of a galaxy, as a matter of fact. Such kind of black holes form when the largest stars die and collapse. Alternately, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun’s mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses. Like most black holes, this entity is inherently massive, with a mass that is 50,000 times greater than our sun’s.
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“It might sound contradictory, but finding such a small, large black hole is very important”, said Vivienne Baldassare of the University of Michigan.
“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”.
It is located in a dwarf, disc galaxy which is 340 million light years away, so there is no need to worry about it eating us any time soon.
A team of scientists have discovered the smallest-known supermassive black hole. The other “supermassive” kind is typically at least 100,000 times the mass of the Sunday. And to make it a little funnier, it is about 100,000 times less massive than other black holes that find themselves at the heart of their galaxies.
In doing so they found the outward push of radiation pressure of this hot gas is about 1 per cent of the black hole’s inward pull of gravity, which ties in with what we know about other supermassive black holes.
But this miniscule melting pot is the first to be identified in a dwarf galaxy and is half the size of that.
Elena Gallo who is an assistant professor of astronomy at the University Of Michigan College Of Literature, Science, and the Arts calls it a teeny supermassive black hole. They were able to study the motion of cool gas in the center of RGG 118 in optical light using the Clay Telescope and also zoomed in on the X-ray emissions from the hot, swirling gas in close proximity to the black hole using Chandra.
One of the biggest mysteries in modern astrophysics is the existence of seriously massive, billion-solar mass supermassive black holes that must have existed in the universe less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
“We have two main ideas for how these supermassive black holes are born”.
This little galaxy, which researchers have named RGG 118, is very small and it is believed not to have merged with any other galaxy until now.
Astronomers don’t yet understand how supermassive black holes form.
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“This black hole in RGG 118 serves as a proxy for those in the very early universe and ultimately may help us decide which of the two is right”.
