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Discovery Of The Smallest Galaxy With Supermassive Black Hole

Astronomers have recently found out that one of the Ultra Compact Dwarf (UCD) galaxies named M60-UCD1 contains a super massive black hole. It is the smallest galaxy ever discovered to have such black hole. It is quite interesting to note that UCD contains about 100 million stars spanning across a few hundred light years. And that our very own Milky Way has about about 300 billion stars that spread across 100,000 light years.


This discovery was made using the Hubble Space Telescope by an international team of astronomers. The galaxy M60-UCD1 has been located about 54 million light years away and it is a satellite of the galaxy Messier 60 which belongs to the Virgo constellation. Though the dwarf galaxy has been discovered to be 300 light years across, astronomers are of the opinion that it is the densest galaxy ever known. And this could probably be the cause for the super massive black hole at the center of it.

Theory has proved that UCD’s are generally large and this additional weight may prove the existence of super massive black holes in them. They are the largest type of black holes which weigh over thousand times more than the sun. Astronomers are in awe of how such a tiny galaxy could contain such a big black hole thereby concluding that the formation of these galaxies happened as a result of collision with other larger galaxies instead of the stars being born in isolation.

Discovery Of The Smallest Galaxy With Supermassive Black Hole - Last modify: September 19th, 2014, Author: Sanghamitra Bhadra
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