Supermassive black hole in the center of a small galaxy

A very strange phenomenon was discovered by astrophysics from the University of Utah (and confirmed by an international team of researchers): this is a black hole in the center of the dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1. Previously, it was believed that black holes are formed only in the center of large galaxies, like our Milky Way. It turned out to be wrong: the diameter of M60-UCD1 is only 157 light years, i.e. 500 times smaller than the Milky Way!

M60-UCD1 is just one of the fifty known supercompact galaxies in the galactic clusters nearest to us, but it is also one of the brightest and one of the densest galaxies of its class. If to compare with ours, then in M60-UCD1 the stars are 25 times denser than ours.


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“It’s like a pinhole in the sky,” said lead researcher Anil Seth of the University of Utah during an online press conference on September 16th. He said that the suspicion of the phenomenon inside the galaxy M60-UCD1 appeared after he saw data on the motion of stars in M60-UCD1, obtained from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. Stars closer to the center moved much faster than the extreme.

The M60-UCD1 revolves around the M60 “mother galaxy” at a distance of 22,000 light years . The distance to the Earth is about 54 million light years. Now the strange characteristics of the M60-UCD1 have become a little clearer, because the black hole in the center makes up 15% of its mass (2.1 × 10 ^{7 the} masses of the Sun). For comparison, our BH is less than 0.01% of the total mass.

The process of the formation of black holes in the center of galaxies is not completely clear.

The scientific work was published on September 17 in the journal Nature. Access to the article is paid, copy .