* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Henize 2-10

Blobrana · L

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in a nearby dwarf galaxy which they claim will shed light on how black holes and galaxies may have grown in the early history of the universe.
A team in the US says that finding a black hole a million times more massive than the sun in a star-forming dwarf galaxy is a strong indication that supermassive black holes formed before the buildup of galaxies.
The galaxy, called Henize 2-10, 30 million light years from Earth, has been studied for years, and is forming stars very rapidly.
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Blobrana · L

Dwarf Galaxy Harbours Supermassive Black Hole

The surprising discovery of a supermassive black hole in a small nearby galaxy has given astronomers a tantalizing look at how black holes and galaxies may have grown in the early history of the Universe. Finding a black hole a million times more massive than the Sun in a star-forming dwarf galaxy is a strong indication that supermassive black holes formed before the buildup of galaxies, the astronomers said.
The galaxy, called Henize 2-10, 30 million light-years from Earth, has been studied for years, and is forming stars very rapidly. Irregularly shaped and about 3,000 light-years across (compared to 100,000 for our own Milky Way), it resembles what scientists think were some of the first galaxies to form in the early Universe.
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Blobrana · L

Title: An actively accreting massive black hole in the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10
Authors: Amy Reines

Supermassive black holes are now thought to lie at the heart of every giant galaxy with a spheroidal component, including our own Milky Way. The birth and growth of the first 'seed' black holes in the earlier Universe, however, is observationally unconstrained and we are only beginning to piece together a scenario for their subsequent evolution. Here we report that the nearby dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 contains a compact radio source at the dynamical centre of the galaxy that is spatially coincident with a hard X-ray source. From these observations, we conclude that Henize 2-10 harbours an actively accreting central black hole with a mass of approximately one million solar masses. This nearby dwarf galaxy, simultaneously hosting a massive black hole and an extreme burst of star formation, is analogous in many ways to galaxies in the infant Universe during the early stages of black-hole growth and galaxy mass assembly. Our results confirm that nearby star-forming dwarf galaxies can indeed form massive black holes, and that by implication so can their primordial counterparts. Moreover, the lack of a substantial spheroidal component in Henize 2-10 indicates that supermassive black-hole growth may precede the build-up of galaxy spheroids.

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