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Astrophysics

Big black hole found in tiny galaxy

Nature volume 470, pages 45–46 (2011)Cite this article

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Conventional wisdom tells us that supermassive black holes are found exclusively in massive galaxies undergoing little star formation. But one such object has now been discovered in a star-forming dwarf galaxy. See Letter p.66

On page 66 of this issue, Reines and collaborators1 report a most unlikely discovery: a big black hole in the centre of a very small galaxy. The low-mass (or 'dwarf') galaxy Henize 2-10, the focus of their research, is currently undergoing a major growth spurt. It seems to have formed an appreciable fraction of its stars in the past 10 million years2, which is unusually fast for present-day galaxies. Now it appears that Henize 2-10 is growing more than just stars. The authors detect a source of light that they attribute to gas falling into a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. This is the first potential detection of a black hole in a rapidly star-forming dwarf galaxy such as Henize 2-10. If confirmed, this observation gives us the hitherto impossible opportunity to study at first hand the growth of black holes in a forming galaxy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jenny E. Greene is in the Department of Astronomy, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. jgreene@astro.as.utexas.edu,

    Jenny E. Greene

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  1. Jenny E. Greene
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Greene, J. Big black hole found in tiny galaxy. Nature 470, 45–46 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/470045a

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