The international team of scientists, some of whom are Russian researcher – Igor Chilingarian of State Astronomical Institute of the Moscow State University Sternberg – opened the supermassive black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy. Their findings the authors published in the journal Nature, and briefly with them can be found at NASA.
Ultra-compact dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1 is located 54 million light-years from Earth, near the elliptical galaxy Messier 60. Half M60-UCD1 mass concentrated in the central region of the object, which has a diameter of 160 light years. This is about a thousand times smaller than the entire Milky Way.
In the studied galaxy is about 140 million stars. Ultra-compact galaxies are among the most dense stellar systems in the universe. Their weight does not exceed 200 million solar masses. Such a large value of its features could be the result of the evolution of galactic matter, or the presence of a supermassive black hole.
Scientists from modeling the dynamic conditions in the M60-UCD1 confirmed the second hypothesis, and observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii allowed sure. NASA telescope allowed us to determine the size and density of the galaxy, and the observatory on an extinct volcano Mauna Kea – the dynamics of the galaxy.
As a result, the researchers concluded that the center of M60-UCD1 a supermassive black hole with a mass, which is 15 percent by weight of the dwarf galaxy. For comparison, the mass of the same hole in the center of the Milky Way is only 0.01 percent of the total mass of the Galaxy.
The mass of the black hole in M60-UCD1 estimated at 21 million solar masses. Scientists believe that one of the reasons for differences in the weight and size of the dwarf galaxy is that part of its matter dragged on a larger stellar system Messier 60.
In the future, according to scientists, M60-UCD1 merge with its neighbor, the center of which is still a giant supermassive black hole mass of 4.5 billion suns. This association will be followed by the merger of two holes.
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