Thanks to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, NASA's X-Ray Observatory and the Clay Telescope in Chile, scientists have uncovered the smallest supermassive black hole to ever be found in the center of a galaxy.
Most surprising, though, is that this small supermassive black hole operates a lot like its larger counterparts, such as the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
So, how small is this new supermassive black hole? It only has the mass of around 50,000 times of our sun, which makes it 100 times less massive than the supermassive black hole within the middle of our galaxy. Of course, when it comes to supermassive black holes, the word "small" is a relative term.
"It might sound contradictory, but finding such a small, large black hole is very important," says Vivienne Baldassare, one of the authors of the study announcing the discovery. "We can use observations of the lightest supermassive black holes to better understand how black holes of different sizes grow."
This small supermassive black hole sits in the center of RGG 118, a dwarf galaxy about 340 million light-years from Earth. Scientists initially spotted it using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and then used the Clay Telescope and data from Chandra to estimate its mass and study the brightness of the gas swirling around it. This led to the discovery that the pressure of the gas' radiation accounts for about one percent of the black hole's gravitational pull, which means that, although this supermassive black hole is small, it operates similarly to other supermassive black holes.
"We found this little supermassive black hole behaves very much like its bigger, and in some cases much bigger, cousins," says study co-author Amy Reines. "This tells us black holes grow in a similar way no matter what their size."
Researchers hope to find other supermassive black holes similar in size to this one, or even smaller, hoping to either confirm or disprove current theories about how black holes form. Scientists believe that these smaller black holes are the key in unlocking the mystery of supermassive black hole formation during the Universe's early history.
