Mergers with other galaxies may have knocked the black hole in dwarf galaxies off-center, creating 'wandering' black holes.
And so to better understand how they may have originated, a team of astronomers identified 13 dwarf galaxies within a billion light year radius of the Earth that they say"almost certainly" harbor a black hole.
"This work has taught us that we must broaden our searches for massive black holes in dwarf galaxies beyond their centers to get a more complete understanding of the population and learn what mechanisms helped form the first massive black holes in the early Universe," co-author Amy Reines, an assistant professor at Montana State University, said in a statement.
The black holes themselves have been estimated to have masses that are around 400,000 times the size of the Sun—a relatively tiny mass in celestial terms, at least for a black hole. To put it into perspective, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is thought to contain the mass of some 4.6 million Suns.
An illustration of a dwarf galaxy with its shape distorted, most likely by a past interaction with another galaxy, and a massive black hole in its outskirts.In approximately half of the galaxies studied, the black hole was not at the center in a well-defined nuclei. Many significantly off-from-center. This is a positioning that is highly unusual in larger galaxies like the Milky Way but more common in dwarf galaxies.
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