Tiny Galaxy Boasts a MASSIVE Black Hole

NASA's Hubble space telescope has recently helped astronomers stumble upon a very  unlikely duo. One of the smallest galaxies ever identified has been discovered to be the home of a super massive black hole.

According to a recent NASA release. The galaxy simply known as M60-UCD1 is small and incredibly dense even for a dwarf galaxy, packing a whopping 140 million stars into a mere diameter of about 300 light years. For comparison, we could fit 500 M60-UCD1s into our own Milky Way galaxy.

This discovery tells astronomers that dwarf galaxies may actually be the packed remnants of colossal galaxies that were torn apart during a galactic collision. That's quite different than previous theories that dwarf galaxies were tiny isolated phenomena.

According to astronomer Anil Seth, who led the study on M60-UCD1, it's really the only logical explanation.

"We don't know of any other way you could make a black hole so big in an object this small," he said in a statement.

However, that's not saying much considering that astronomers are repeatedly rewriting the textbooks on galaxy formation models.

Seth adds that what's "pretty amazing" about all this is that the supermassive black hole at the center of M60-UCD1 makes up a whopping 15 percent of the tiny galaxy. By comparison, the Milky Way's black hole only makes up 0.01 percent of its total mass.

That's a testament not only to how massive this supermassive black hole is, but how incredibly small the dwarf galaxy is.

Seth and his colleagues theorize that M60-UCD1 was once a large galaxy containing 10 billion stars, but then it passed very close to the center of an even larger galaxy, M60, and in that process all the stars and dark matter in the outer part of the galaxy were torn away. Eventually, M60 may entirely consume its tiny neighbor, but it will have to first fight the incredible pull of M60-UCD1's supermassive black hole to do so.

The study was published in the journal Nature on Sep. 17