Astronomers discovered a supermassive black hole in the dwarf Galaxy MRK 462. The results of the study that briefly describes in a press release on Phys.org will help scientists find out the mechanisms for the formation of giant black holes in the universe.
The black hole weighing 200 thousand mass of the Sun is found using the X-ray space observatory of NASA CANDRA. It is located in the galaxy consisting of just a few billion stars, which is unusual for the black hole of such a mass. Usually, supermassive black holes are located in large and bright galaxies nuclei, and they can be revealed to rapidly move the central stars. If the black hole grows, it can be detected by X-ray, which emits hot gas, heated to millions of degrees.
Researchers analyzed X-ray emissions emitted by eight dwarf galaxies, and only one of them was seen X-ray signature characteristic of a growing black hole. The high intensity of the radiation indicates that the supermassive black hole MRK 462 is hidden by hot gas. According to scientists, the discovery indicates that such black holes can actually meet in dwarf galaxies, but invisible for direct observation.
It is known that supermassive black holes could increase the mass of up to a billion suns when the age of the universe reached only a billion years. According to one of the hypotheses, at the early stage of its development, such black holes were relatively small embryos (weighing several thousand Suns), which were formed during a collapse of giant gas and dust clouds.