FollowThe stars scientists have discovered a new supermassive black hole using the Hubble space telescope. This enormous hole is in the center of one of the smallest galaxies in the universe. The new suppermassive balck hole is four times larger than the black hole in our Milky Way galaxy. The “dwarf galaxy” the recently discovered black hole is five hundred times smaller than the Milky Way, astronomers say. It has a diameter of 300 light years.
“We don’t know of any other way you could make a black hole so big in an object this small,” said Anil Seth, one of the scientists involved.
The dwarf galaxy named M60-UCD1 has about 140 million stars, while the Milky Way consists of about 200 million stars and is over 100,000 light years across.
NASA says that if one looks at the night sky from inside the dwarf galaxy, one could see at least 1 million stars. Form Earth you can only see a few thousand.
Scientists wonder how would a supermassive black hole form in the center of such a small galaxy. They say that it’s not uncommon that a supermassive black hole to form at the center of a galaxy but they didn’t believe that such thing was possible with a dwarf galaxy.
The only explanation they could think of was that the dwarf galaxy used to be a “normal” one at some point, with about 10 billion stars, and collided with another galaxy. When this happens, a galaxy “sucks” the stars from the neighbor galaxy. Astronomers believe that somewhere in the far away future the two galaxies will eventually merge and the two supermassive black holes will also merge with each other. They don’t know what would happen if two supermassive black holes join forces but they think that it would probably be a spectacular event to be witnessed.
