(Press-News.org) Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground observation have found an unlikely object in an improbable place -- a monster black hole lurking inside one of the tiniest galaxies ever known.
The black hole is five times the mass of the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It is inside one of the densest galaxies known to date -- the M60-UCD1 dwarf galaxy that crams 140 million stars within a diameter of about 300 light-years, which is only 1/500th of our galaxy's diameter.
If you lived inside this dwarf galaxy, the night sky would dazzle with at least 1 million stars visible to the naked eye. Our nighttime sky as seen from Earth's surface shows 4,000 stars.
The finding implies there are many other compact galaxies in the universe that contain supermassive black holes. The observation also suggests dwarf galaxies may actually be the stripped remnants of larger galaxies that were torn apart during collisions with other galaxies rather than small islands of stars born in isolation.
"We don't know of any other way you could make a black hole so big in an object this small," said University of Utah astronomer Anil Seth, lead author of an international study of the dwarf galaxy published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Seth's team of astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini North 8-meter optical and infrared telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea to observe M60-UCD1 and measure the black hole's mass. The sharp Hubble images provide information about the galaxy's diameter and stellar density. Gemini measures the stellar motions as affected by the black hole's pull. These data are used to calculate the mass of the black hole.
Black holes are gravitationally collapsed, ultra-compact objects that have a gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape. Supermassive black holes -- those with the mass of at least one million stars like our sun -- are thought to be at the centers of many galaxies.
The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy has the mass of four million suns. As heavy as that is, it is less than 0.01 percent of the Milky Way's total mass. By comparison, the supermassive black hole at the center of M60-UCD1, which has the mass of 21 million suns, is a stunning 15 percent of the small galaxy's total mass.
"That is pretty amazing, given that the Milky Way is 500 times larger and more than 1,000 times heavier than the dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1," Seth said.
One explanation is that M60-UCD1 was once a large galaxy containing 10 billion stars, but then it passed very close to the center of an even larger galaxy, M60, and in that process all the stars and dark matter in the outer part of the galaxy were torn away and became part of M60.
The team believes that M60-UCD1 may eventually be pulled to fully merge with M60, which has its own monster black hole that weighs a whopping 4.5 billion solar masses, or more than 1,000 times bigger than the black hole in our galaxy. When that happens, the black holes in both galaxies also likely will merge. Both galaxies are 50 million light-years away.
INFORMATION:
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.
For images and more information about Hubble, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble
Hubble helps find smallest known galaxy containing a supermassive black hole
2014-09-17
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Space: The final frontier… open to the public
2014-09-17
Historically, spaceflight has been reserved for the very healthy. Astronauts are selected for their ability to meet the highest physical and psychological standards to prepare them for any unknown challenges. However, with the advent of commercial spaceflight, average people can now fly for enjoyment. The aerospace medicine community has had very little information about what medical conditions or diseases should be considered particularly risky in the spaceflight environment, as most medical conditions have never been studied for risk in space — until now.
The aerospace ...
NASA releases IRIS footage of X-class flare
2014-09-17
On Sept. 10, 2014, NASA's newest solar observatory, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, mission joined other telescopes to witness an X-class flare – an example of one of the strongest solar flares -- on the sun. Combing observations from more than one telescope helps create a much more complete picture of such events on our closest star. Watch the movie to see how the flare appears different through the eyes of IRIS than it does through NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The movie shows IRIS imagery focused in on material at around 60,000 Kelvin (107,500 ...
Power isn't enough: Study reveals the missing link for effective leadership
2014-09-17
NEW YORK—With the National Football League in full damage-control mode, there are many questions about how the NFL's leader handled the Ray Rice case. Was Goodell ignoring the pleas of stakeholders—former NFL players, the media and domestic violence groups—when deciding on a two game penalty? The answer may lie in a study out today by Columbia Business School.
The research, just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, finds that leaders who fail to take into account their audiences' perspective have a far greater propensity to bungle the issue and conversation. ...
Reducing traffic congestion with wireless system
2014-09-17
At the Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress last week, MIT researchers received one of the best-paper awards for a new system, dubbed RoadRunner, that uses GPS-style turn-by-turn directions to route drivers around congested roadways.
In simulations using data supplied by Singapore's Land Transit Authority, the researchers compared their system to one currently in use in Singapore, which charges drivers with dashboard-mounted transponders a toll for entering congested areas.
The Singapore system gauges drivers' locations with radio transmitters mounted on ...
NASA sees Odile soaking Mexico and southwestern US
2014-09-17
Tropical Storm Odile continues to spread moisture and generate strong thunderstorms with heavy rainfall over northern Mexico's mainland and the Baja California as well as the southwestern U.S. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite measured rainfall rates from space as it passed over Odile.
Odile had weakened to a tropical storm with winds of about 55 knots (63.3 mph) when the TRMM satellite flew over on September 16, 2014 at 0917 UTC (2:19 a.m. PDT). Odile was still well organized and TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) measured rain falling at a rate ...
Doing science just got cheaper -- and faster
2014-09-17
Furnishing a research lab can be pretty expensive. Now a team led by an engineer at Michigan Technological University has published an open-source library of designs that will let scientists slash the cost of one commonly used piece of equipment: the syringe pump.
Syringe pumps are used to dispatch precise amounts of liquid, as for drug delivery or mixing chemicals in a reaction. They can also cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Joshua Pearce and his team of Michigan Tech students published the library of free syringe-pump designs, which anyone can make on a ...
The future of global agriculture may include new land, fewer harvests
2014-09-17
Climate change may expand suitable cropland, particularly in the Northern high latitudes, but tropical regions may becoming decreasingly suitable, according to a study published September 17, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Florian Zabel from Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany and colleagues.
Most of the Earth's accessible agricultural land are already under cultivation. Ecological factors such as climate, soil quality, water supply and topography determine the suitability of land for agriculture. Climate change may impact global agriculture, but some ...
Nemo's epic journey to find a new home
2014-09-17
New research has found clownfish larvae can swim up to 400 kilometres in search of a home, which makes them better able to cope with environmental change.
Clownfish spend their entire adult lives under the protection of their host anemone but as babies they must wander the open ocean, says study co-author, Dr Hugo Harrison from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University.
"In the past we haven't known where they go, but now we've been given a rare glimpse into how far they can swim, crossing large tracts of ocean to find ...
Blood test could identify when cancer treatment has become detrimental
2014-09-17
Some treatments for prostate cancer, while initially effective at controlling the disease, not only stop working over time but actually start driving tumour growth, a major new study shows.
Researchers identified the emergence of drug-resistant cancer cells by testing repeated blood samples from patients with advanced prostate cancer.
They set out a new 'treatment paradigm' – the constant monitoring of patients using a blood test for signs that therapy is becoming counter-productive.
The study was conducted at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, The Royal Marsden ...
Expedition finds Nemo can travel great distances to connect populations
2014-09-17
Clownfish spend their entire lives nestling in the protective tentacles of host anemones, but new research shows that as babies they sometimes travel hundreds of kilometres across the open ocean. Although the process of long-distance dispersal by reef fish has been predicted, this is the first time that the high level exchange of offspring between distant populations has been observed.
Dr Steve Simpson, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology and Global Change at the University of Exeter, and colleagues from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef ...