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Hubble finds a supermassive black hole in one of the smallest known galaxies

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G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
Link. Didn't a thread, swallow up if old.

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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.
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H

hipbabboom

Huh? What did I say? Did I screw up again? :(
Isn't the conventional wisdom that the bigger the black hole, the brighter the galaxy? Would it mean this is a really old galaxy where the black hole has been feeding for so long that there's little mass left at its center to cause the friction that makes galaxies bright OR has conventional wisdom about black holes changed?
 
MidgarBlowedUp

MidgarBlowedUp

Member
I always get this really crappy feeling that humans will finally solve and learn so many things about the universe and then.. bam we all die. Then millions of years later some other life form on another planet gets some records or data that we saved, only they never evolve enough to understand any of it. They just poop on it and burn it or something.
 
W

Woorloog

Banned
kess said:
Who knows, it was probably a decent size galaxy, oh, a billion years or so ago.
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This is what i was thinking.
Pretty sure we have detected odd gamma bursts from the black hole in the center of our galaxy, and it has been suggested those bursts are from the black hole eating some hapless planets or stars.
Do black holes grow as they absorb more stuff?
 
M

Mr-Joker

Banned
All hail our goddess.

200px-Rosalina_Artwork_MK.jpg



MidgarBlowedUp said:
I always get this really crappy feeling that humans will finally solve and learn so many things about the universe and then.. bam we all die. Then millions of years later some other life form on another planet gets some records or data that we saved, only they never evolve enough to understand any of it. They just poop on it and burn it or something.
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Well nothing last forever as history has shown many many times.

ComputerMKII said:
The potential for sex jokes goes through the roof
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That's what she said. Whoooo!
 
MidgarBlowedUp

MidgarBlowedUp

Member
J10 said:
Why does that scare you? It's too far away to be of any danger.
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Yeah until we figure out how to fold space time to travel faster than the speed of light. Then some intern punches in a 9 instead of a 6 and folds the damn thing right on top of us.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
Woorloog said:
This is what i was thinking.
Pretty sure we have detected odd gamma bursts from the black hole in the center of our galaxy, and it has been suggested those bursts are from the black hole eating some hapless planets or stars.
Do black holes grow as they absorb more stuff?
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How would it not grow in mass as more things fall into it? It's not like there was a 4 million solar mass star that collapsed to form the one at the center of our galaxy.
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Woorloog said:
This is what i was thinking.
Pretty sure we have detected odd gamma bursts from the black hole in the center of our galaxy, and it has been suggested those bursts are from the black hole eating some hapless planets or stars.
Do black holes grow as they absorb more stuff?
Click to expand...

Yup. A common misconception is that black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners, but they're really just massive bodies. If you replaced the sun with a black hole of the same mass all the planets would keep orbiting like usual. Their one major feature is that, since nothing can escape them (well, except for information homogenized radiation) they basically always grow larger.

EDIT: Okay yeah they can shrink if they radiate faster than anything falls into them
 
U

Uncle_Classy

Member
Woorloog said:
This is what i was thinking.
Pretty sure we have detected odd gamma bursts from the black hole in the center of our galaxy, and it has been suggested those bursts are from the black hole eating some hapless planets or stars.
Do black holes grow as they absorb more stuff?
Click to expand...

In the sense that they become more massive, yes. Over time, that mass is thought to bleed off as Hawking radiation though, meaning that all black holes will eventually evaporate away. If their local source of matter is completely consumed, that is.
 
P

Protein

Banned
This is more amazing

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.
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D

DarkKyo

Member
J10 said:
Why does that scare you? It's too far away to be of any danger.
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I think it's the idea that massive, epic, and unimaginable orbs of utter oblivion are lurking through the void of space just waiting for some random moment to happen upon a speck of a blue planet with 7,000,000,000 sentient brains on it and swallow it into nothingness.
 
F

foxuzamaki

Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
Protein said:
This is more amazing
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I was going to comment on that, I swear ive seen way more than 4,000 stars in the sky with my naked eye before, maybe I havent, but it certainly seems like it sometimes, 4,000 just feels like too little a number.
 
C

cdyhybrid

Member
MidgarBlowedUp said:
I always get this really crappy feeling that humans will finally solve and learn so many things about the universe and then.. bam we all die. Then millions of years later some other life form on another planet gets some records or data that we saved, only they never evolve enough to understand any of it. They just poop on it and burn it or something.
Click to expand...

No king rules forever.

MidgarBlowedUp said:
Yeah until we figure out how to fold space time to travel faster than the speed of light. Then some intern punches in a 9 instead of a 6 and folds the damn thing right on top of us.
Click to expand...

Having an intern generate wormholes for you seems like a bad idea.

Protein said:
This is more amazing
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Would kill to see that with my own eyes.

DarkKyo said:
I think it's the idea that massive, epic, and unimaginable orbs of utter oblivion are lurking through the void of space just waiting for some random moment to happen upon a speck of a blue planet with 7,000,000,000 sentient brains on it and swallow it into nothingness.
Click to expand...

They don't prowl the universe and pounce on unsuspecting galaxies :lol

There's one at the center of our galaxy, you know ;)
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
The Technomancer said:
Yup. A common misconception is that black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners, but they're really just massive bodies. If you replaced the sun with a black hole of the same mass all the planets would keep orbiting like usual. Their one major feature is that, since nothing can escape them (well, except for information homogenized radiation) they basically always grow larger.

EDIT: Okay yeah they can shrink if they radiate faster than anything falls into them
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Which means even black holes will eventually die and there will be nothing left in the universe but a few particles that only rarely interact.

Super fun times.
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
cdyhybrid said:
No king rules forever.



Having an intern generate wormholes for you seems like a bad idea.



Would kill to see that with my own eyes.



They don't prowl the universe and pounce on unsuspecting galaxies :lol

There's one at the center of our galaxy, you know ;)
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There are rogue black holes wandering around just like there are rogue star and planets. I dont know if they prowl though.
 
S

snacknuts

we all knew her
My aunt told me on Sunday that black holes are made up by scientists to confuse people to keep them from going to church. She was completely serious. I'm going to send her this article.
 
Raonak

Raonak

Banned
J10 said:
Why does that scare you? It's too far away to be of any danger.
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You realise most galaxies have a supermassive black hole in the center keeping it together (much like a sun keeps a solar system together).
There's one of these giant's in the middle of our galaxy.
 
R

Ranvier

Member
Damn our big ol galaxy. If earth was in a galaxy like this we might have found extraterrestrial life already.

Must be nice for life there. Things are just a hop and a skip away.

Relatively speaking of course.
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
Man, I would love to see the night sky from one of the planets in that galaxy. 1 million viewable stars? That's insanity. I wonder if it'd practically be day all the time.
 
D

DonasaurusRex

Online Ho Champ
snacknuts said:
My aunt told me on Sunday that black holes are made up by scientists to confuse people to keep them from going to church. She was completely serious. I'm going to send her this article.
Click to expand...

didnt hawking recently say blackholes didnt exist now.

its pandemonium i tell ya!
 
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