NASA finds tiniest galaxy has 'supermassive' black hole
Geege Schuman stashed this in Space
Stashed in: The Universe, Awesome, NASA, space, NASA to Me, Stars!, yeah, science!
One of the coolest things about astronomy is that due to simple laws of physics big things tend to become small and small things tend to become big!
It's challenging as a human to imagine the scale of the very big and the very small.
What laws of physics can teach us. Once all the weight is concentrated in the black hole, the galaxy becomes small. Great case to demonstrate the need for addressing wealth gap.
The wealthy create their own black holes?
By the way, wow:
They say big things come in little packages. That may never be more true than with what astronomers have just discovered: A "monster" black hole hiding inside one of the smallest galaxies ever known.
NASA said Wednesday that astronomers using its Hubble Space Telescope have found a new dwarf galaxy -- known as M60-UCD1 -- that "crams 140 million stars within a diameter of about 300 light-years, which is only 1/500th" the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.
At the core of this tiny galaxy is what NASA is calling a "supermassive," or "monster" black hole, one that has five times the mass of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. A dwarf galaxy is one that has a small fraction of the hundreds of billion of stars in the Milky Way.
However, when comparing the density of the Milky Way and the newly-discovered galaxy, NASA said looking at the nighttime sky from Earth reveals about 4,000 stars. Someone looking up into the sky from inside M60-UCD1 would see a million stars.
According to NASA, this finding indicates there could be many other dense galaxies throughout the universe that also have giant black holes. At the same time, the space agency said, the discovery may mean that dwarf galaxies like M60-UCD1 could be the ripped remnants of larger galaxies that broke apart during violent events such as collisions with other galaxies.
5:27 PM Sep 17 2014