Gargantuan black hole found at the heart of dwarf galaxy

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Walter L. Wagner, Sep 18, 2014.

  1. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    http://physicsworld.com/cws/article...black-hole-found-at-the-heart-of-dwarf-galaxy

    A supermassive black hole (SMBH) has been found lurking in an unexpected location – at the heart of an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy – according to new observations made by an international team of astronomers. Although SMBHs are thought to reside at the centre of most large galaxies including our own Milky Way, this is the smallest galaxy known to host a black hole. The team’s findings suggest that many other such ultra-compact dwarf galaxies may house black holes, meaning that there may be many more SMBHs in our galactic neighbourhood than previously thought.
     
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  3. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Yep, quite an Interesting find.
    Although personally, I'm not really surprised.
     
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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    I actually suspect all galaxies to have a SMBH at their cores.
     
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  7. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    I'll take that a step further and state all galaxies require a SMBH to be galaxies. There may be star clusters that don't have black holes, but I would never call them galaxies. That being the case, I say we need to know how black holes could have come about in the first place? My own theory on the subject is they were in existence before the Big Bang event and served as places which created an environment where stars could actually form.
     
  8. forrest noble Registered Senior Member

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    This is not the amazing part of this discovery. This discovery contradicts current models of black hole formation. The prevailing theory is that galactic black holes are created from the matter within the galaxy falling into its center creating an ever increasing size galactic black hole. But how could such a small middle age appearing galaxy create such a large black hole, if present theory is valid? It suggests another cause for at least some galactic black holes, and maybe that galactic black holes created the galaxies surrounding them rather than the other way around.
     
  9. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Looks to me like you didn't read the whole article. They stated that it was most likely the larger galaxy M60 that striped most of the stars away from the smaller galaxy leaving the Black hole core and the core stars around it. That explanation sounds very plausible to me.
     
  10. forrest noble Registered Senior Member

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    Yes, I read the article some time ago and was just now commenting on it, so I forgot about their speculation as to how such a black hole and galaxy could have come to be. Although M60 could have stripped the stars from the dwarf galaxy by a direct encounter, there seems to be no direct evidence for it. In other cases of galactic encounters there is often a trail of stars between the galaxies, or in one galaxy toward the direction of the other, that would be strong evidence for their interaction at one time. Such scenarios are simply speculation, but the M60 stripping proposal would be consistent with the standard model.
     
  11. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    I do agree that the standard model of our universe leaves a lot to be desired. But as far as that dwarf galaxy is concerned, it seems a good bet that something stripped the outer stars off it. Given the size of the black hole, that galaxy should have been bigger than the Milkyway at sometime in it's life cycle. Makes me wonder if there might be SMBH's that have no stars? If they did exist it would be about as close to impossible to detect them as you can get especially if they are in between galaxies where there are no stars to give them away.
     
  12. forrest noble Registered Senior Member

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    I don't know about black holes that big, but I believe that "naked" galactic black holes do exist since I believe that such large black holes create the galaxies that surround them rather than the other way around. But as you explained and quarried, how would they be detected? Certainly a claim of such a discovery would be highly speculative if there were no stars or galaxies for it to influence. They might be detected by the way they might smear the light from background galaxies behind them?

    Such a creation process is probably contrary to the BB model but was a proposal of the Quasi-Steady State model. They called it 'C' fields that at some time in their evolution surround galactic black holes ('C' for creation as I recall) to provide for the continuous creation of new matter to form a galaxy surrounding the black hole. My own cosmology has kinship to this proposal.

    On a much smaller scale there is the proposal of Hawking radiation, the creation of new electrons and positrons, and possibly protons, surrounding black holes of all sizes, which would cause black holes to accordingly "evaporate."
     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2014
  13. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not yet convinced that Hawking radiation is real, but even if it is it would take much longer for even a small SMBH to evaporate than it would for all the stars in our universe to burn all the available star fuel (Hydrogen). We would have a very dark universe made up of dark galaxies and all of them would still be interacting with each other as if they still had lit up stars. Stars are only a special condition of our local universe and as far as black holes go just a brief moment of time in their immense lifecycles.
     

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