Astronomers Find Wandering Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:
Astronomers seeking to learn about the mechanisms that formed massive black holes in the early history of the Universe have gained important new clues with the discovery of 13 such black holes in dwarf galaxies less than a billion light-years from Earth.
These dwarf galaxies, more than 100 times less massive than our own Milky Way, are among the smallest galaxies known to host massive black holes. The scientists expect that the black holes in these smaller galaxies average about 400,000 times the mass of our Sun.
[...] The scientists started by selecting a sample of galaxies from the NASA-Sloan Atlas, a catalog of galaxies made with visible-light telescopes. They chose galaxies with stars totalling less than 3 billion times the mass of the Sun, about equal to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion of the Milky Way. From this sample, they picked candidates that also appeared in the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) survey, made between 1993 and 2011.
They then used the VLA[*] to make new and more sensitive, high-resolution images of 111 of the selected galaxies.
"The new VLA observations revealed that 13 of these galaxies have strong evidence for a massive black hole that is actively consuming surrounding material. We were very surprised to find that, in roughly half of those 13 galaxies, the black hole is not at the center of the galaxy, unlike the case in larger galaxies," Reines said
[*] VLA: Very Large Array.
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