It’s the biggest oxymoron ever: An itty-bitty supermassive black hole — the smallest supermassive black hole ever found in the center of a galaxy, as a matter of fact.
This is admittedly confusing. A tiny supermassive black hole? Why bother calling it supermassive, then? Why bother with adjectives?
Black holes come in at least two flavors: stellar and supermassive. A stellar black hole forms when a huge star collapses in on itself, and those black holes will be just a few times more massive than our sun. Supermassive black holes sit at the center of most galaxies.
Supermassive black holes are typically at least 100,000 times as massive as the sun. But a tiny supermassive black hole, described in a study published this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is just 50,000 times as massive as the sun — and 100 times less massive than the black hole at the center of our own galaxy.
The black hole sits in the center of a dwarf galaxy 340 million light years from Earth. Because the galaxy and its black hole are so small, researchers are hoping they might share similarities with young galaxies.
