Astronomers have discovered the first evidence of giant black holes in dwarf galaxies.
One pair is in a galaxy clusterAbell 133, 760 million light years from Earth. The other is in the galaxy cluster Abell 1758S, at a distance of about 3.2 billion light years. Both couples are ready to face each other.
The couple in Abell 133 appears to bein the later stages of the merger. She was noticed to have a long tail caused by tidal effects from the collision. She was noticed to have a long tail caused by tidal effects from the collision. The galaxies in Abell 1758S, by contrast, are in the early stages of merging.
The convergence of galaxies attracts gas towards black holes.Thanks to this, each of them is actively growing. Eventually, the collision of the black holes will cause them to merge into a much larger object. Two dwarf galaxies will also merge into one.
Scientists believe that in the early Universe,several hundred million years after the Big Bang, there were many dwarf galaxies. Most of them merged with others, which led to the appearance of larger and larger objects that scientists observe now.
The total mass of stars in dwarf galaxies is approximately 3 billion Suns. For comparison, in the Milky Way the mass of stars is equal to 60 billion Suns.
The earliest dwarf galaxies are practicallyimpossible to observe with modern technology due to the fact that they are dim and far away. Moreover, it is difficult to observe their hearts—black holes. “The search for black holes in dwarf galaxies is very difficult and has not yet been successful,” the scientists write.
To solve the problem, scientists introducedsystematic review of Chandra's deep X-ray observations and compared them with infrared data from NASA's Wide Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
The material surrounding black holes canheat up to millions of degrees, producing large amounts of X-rays. Astronomers used Chandra data and looked for pairs of bright X-ray sources in colliding dwarf galaxies for evidence of two black holes and found two examples.
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Cover illustration: Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA