NASA astronomers detailed the smallest supermassive black hole ever detected, taking the irony of their discovery well into account.
"It might sound contradictory, but finding such a small, large black hole is very important," Vivienne Baldassare a researcher at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor who served as the first author on the new study, said in a NASA press release. "We can use observations of the lightest supermassive black holes to better understand how black holes of different sizes grow."
Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the new study details a supermassive black hole about 50,000 times more massive than the sun. However, the black hole is dramatically less massive than the previous record holder at about half the mass.
"We found this little supermassive black hole behaves very much like its bigger, and in some cases much bigger, cousins," study co-author Amy Reines, Baldassare colleague at UM, said in the release. "This tells us black holes grow in a similar way no matter what their size."
The researchers found the black hole in a galaxy named RGG 118, which is about 340 million light years from Earth, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 6.5-meter Clay Telescope in Chile.
"We have two main ideas for how these supermassive black holes are born," Elena Gallo, a study co-author at UM, said in the release. "This black hole in RGG 118 is serving as a proxy for those in the very early universe and ultimately may help us decide which of the two is right."
