“Just like fireflies, we see black holes only when they’re lit up-when they’re growing-and the lit-up ones give us a clue to how many we can’t see,” she said.Įxtraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence Kannappan compared their black hole discovery to fireflies. … But there’s still the lingering question: Where do such supermassive black holes come from? Our work is a teeny step closer to answering that question.” “This result really blew my mind because these black holes were previously hiding in plain sight,” Polimera said. But how often dwarf galaxies contain a massive black hole is unknown, leaving a key gap in understanding how black holes and galaxies evolve together. Each dwarf that falls in may bring with it a central massive black hole, tens or hundreds of thousands of times the mass of our sun, potentially destined to be swallowed by the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. “There’s so much we want to learn about them.”Īs a giant spiral galaxy, the Milky Way is believed to have been built up from mergers of many smaller dwarf galaxies. “ The black holes we’ve found are the basic building blocks of supermassive black holes like the one in our own Milky Way,” Kannappan said. From left, Sheila Kannappan and Mugdha Polimera. The Astrophysical Journal published these findings on May 24.

Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led by faculty-graduate student team Sheila Kannappan and Mugdha Polimera, have found a previously overlooked treasure trove of massive black holes in dwarf galaxies that offer a glimpse into the life story of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Massive blackhole