Black holes are astronomical masses where stars and planets are dissolved. Researchers have found a black hole in galaxy Mrk462 which has 200,000 times the mass of the sun buried in gas and dust. Mrk galaxy contains only several hundred million stars. Our Milky Way galaxy is home to few billion stars. The discovery of super massive black hole in small galaxy unravels the mystery how the very biggest black holes grow.
This black hole in Mrk 462 is smallest of the supermassive or monster black holes. In larger galaxies astronomers often find black holes by looking for rapid motions of stars and in the centers of galaxies. But, dwarf galaxies are too small and dim for most current instrument to detect this. The researchers in this study used Chandra to look at eight dwarf galaxies that had previously shown hints of black hole growth from optical data gathered by Solan Digital Sky Survey. Through a study it was found that Mrk 462 black hole is heavily obscured by gas.
As per previous research black holes can grow a billion solar masses by the time the universe is less than a billion years old. One idea is that these huge objects were created when massive stars collapsed to form black holes that weighted only 100 times the mass of the Sun. These expectations apply because the conditions necessary for the direct collapse from a giant cloud to medium sized black hole could be rare.
“We can’t make strong conclusions from one example, but this result should encourage much more extensive searches for buried black holes in dwarf galaxies,” said Jack Parker of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who led the study with colleague Ryan Hickox, also from Dartmouth. “We’re excited about what we might learn.”