A supermassive black hole (SBH) was discovered by Scientist at the center of a tiny galaxy, based on a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The galaxy, named Fornax UCDs belongs to a recent discovery rare and unusual class of stellar systems called ultracompact dwarfs (UCDs), which are populated by older stars.
The UCDs are larger, brighter and more massive than the biggest globular clusters large groups of ancient stars that are closely packed together somewhere in the Milky Way in form of spherical. According to Steffen Mieske, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility in the Chilean Atacama Desert, who was not involved in the research said: “the UCDs are significantly more compact than the typical dwarf galaxies of comparable luminosity”.
The mass of UCDs reaches up to several tens of millions of solar masses while the radius does not exceed three hundred light years. By collation, the radius of the Milky Way is about 50,000 light years and is thought to be hundreds of billions of times that of our Sun.
Despite Fornax’s status as a dwarf, the scientist from Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Russia discovers that mass of the black hole at its center was equivalent to about 3.5 million suns which are roughly the same as the black hole that lies at the heart of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*.
This black hole is the fourth ever to be discovered in a UCD and is corresponding to around 4 percent of the galaxy’s total mass. This ratio is significantly lower, around 0.3 percent – in “normal” galaxies.
The team used data collected by SINFONI - an infrared detecting equipment at one of the VLT’s 8-meter telescopes - to recognize the black hole. According to the researchers, the patterns in the data could only be described by the presence of a massive central black hole.
In the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses, supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole in discovery.
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