Giant black hole inside a tiny satellite galaxy defies explanation - Livescience.com

"There is no explanation for this kind of black hole in dwarf spheroidal galaxies.".

A tiny galaxy orbiting at the outskirts of the Milky Way appears to have a giant black hole at its center, comparable to that of the much larger Milky Way itself, and scientists don't know why.

Unexpectedly, at the heart of the little Leo I sits a black hole that is nearly as large as the one at the heart of the entire Milky Way, a new study found.

The discovery defies expectations as astronomers believed giant black holes grow from collisions between galaxies and should correspond with the galaxy's size. .

"There is no explanation for this kind of black hole in dwarf spheroidal galaxies," María José Bustamante, an astronomy doctoral graduate at the University of Texas, Austin and lead author of the new paper, said in a statement. .

Virus-W measures the motion of stars in small galaxies around the Milky Way and infers the amount of dark matter in those galaxies from those motion?

When the team ran data gathered in the observations through their computer models, they found that Leo I appears to have basically no dark matter but a black hole at its center as heavy as 3 million suns.

(The Sagittarius A* black hole at the center of the Milky Way is only 25% larger.).

"You have a very small galaxy that is falling into the Milky Way, and its black hole is about as massive as the Milky Way's," Karl Gebhardt, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin, and a co-author of the new study, said in the statement.