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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the dense-at-the-center dept.

A team of scientists from the Faculty of Physics and Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, MSU, leading an international collaboration with members from Europe, Chile, the U.S. and Australia discovered a supermassive black hole in the center of the Fornax galaxy. The results of the research were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

Fornax UCD3 is a part of a Fornax galaxy cluster and belongs to a very rare and unusual class of galaxies, ultracompact dwarfs. The mass of such dwarf galaxies reaches several dozen millions of solar masses, and the radius does not typically exceed 300 light years. This ratio between mass and size makes UCDs the densest stellar systems in the universe.

"We have discovered a supermassive black hole in the center of Fornax UCD3. The black hole mass is 3.5 million that of the sun, similar to the central black hole in our own Milky Way," explained Anton Afanasiev, the first author of the article, a student of the department of the Faculty of Physics, MSU.

[...] The black hole discovered by the authors is the fourth ever to be found in UCDs and corresponds to 4 percent of the total galaxy mass. In average galaxies, this ratio is considerably lower (about 0.3 percent). Though there are few known examples, the existence of massive black holes in UCDs is a strong argument for the tidal origin of such galaxies. According to this hypothesis, an average-sized galaxy passed a bigger and more massive one at a certain stage of its evolution, and as a result of the influence of tidal forces, lost the majority of its stars. The remaining compact nucleus has become what we know as an ultracompact dwarf.

"To be able to say with complete assurance that this hypothesis is correct, we need to discover more supermassive black holes in UCDs. This is one of the prospects of this work.

Moreover, a similar methodology may be applied to more massive and less dense compact elliptical galaxies. In one of our next works, we will study the population of central black holes in objects of this kind," concluded the scientist.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:49PM (#721555)

    The biggest fucking hole I've ever seen. Damn. You don't fuck that kinda hole.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:52PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:52PM (#721556)

    What does Aussie gov't say?

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:34PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:34PM (#721574)

      The UK government says "pay me 20 quid if you want to google "supermassive black hole dwarf"".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:35PM (#721575)

    That's a big hole, man. Humongous.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:40PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:40PM (#721578) Journal

    Is the takeaway here that some dwarf galaxies don't have central supermassive black holes, but some do, either from losing lots of stars or just because things would tend to orbit/feed a supermassive black hole?

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  • (Score: 2) by ilPapa on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:30AM

    by ilPapa (2366) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:30AM (#721677) Journal
    --
    You are still welcome on my lawn.
  • (Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Wednesday August 15 2018, @07:18AM

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @07:18AM (#721703)

    Sounds like it is time for another renormalization of science terms?

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