A new study has found that the gigantic black holes in the hearts of galaxies were apparently born big and surprisingly they were more weighty than earlier thought.
The study says, the black holes found in dwarf and large galaxies including Milky Way contain 1,000 to 10,000 times the mass of the sun.
The new findings have challenged the one popular theory of supermassive black hole evolution. The new study has suggested that galaxy mergers aren’t necessary to create these behemoths, which can harbor billions of times more mass than the sun.
Lead author Shobita Satyapal of George Mason University in Virginia, said in a statement, “We still don’t know how the monstrous black holes that reside in galaxy centers formed. But finding big black holes in tiny galaxies shows us that big black holes must somehow have been created in the early universe, before galaxies collided with other galaxies.”
Researchers further explained that there is huge possibility that the supermassive black holes grow primarily by gobbling up gas and dust.
For the research, the scientists analyzed the data and observations of dwarf galaxies made by Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft (WISE) of NASA.
“Our findings suggest the original seeds of supermassive black holes are quite massive themselves,” Satyapal said.
Astronomer Daniel Stern, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement, “Though it will take more research to confirm whether the dwarf galaxies are indeed dominated by actively feeding black holes, this is exactly what WISE was designed to do: find interesting objects that stand out from the pack.”
Stern was not part of the study team.
