Chandra Detects Mini-Supermassive Black Hole in Star-Forming Dwarf Galaxy astronomy space science
This graphic shows X-rays that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected from the dwarf galaxy Mrk 462. This X-ray emission is important because it reveals the presence of a growing supermassive black hole within this relatively small galaxy. The mass contained in this black hole — about 200,000 times the mass of the Sun — provides information to astronomers about how some of the earliest black holes in the Universe may have formed and grown billions of years ago.
Another technique is to search for the signatures of growing black holes, such as gas being heated up to millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays as it falls towards a black hole. “Because buried black holes are even harder to detect than exposed ones, finding this example might mean there are a lot more dwarf galaxies out there with similar black holes,” said Dr. Ryan Hickox, also from Dartmouth College.
One idea is that these huge objects were created when massive stars collapsed to form black holes that weighed only about 100 times the mass of the Sun. A large fraction of dwarf galaxies with supermassive black holes favors the idea that small black hole seeds from the earliest generation of stars grew astonishingly quickly to form the billion solar mass objects in the early Universe.
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