Supermassive Black Hole Found in Dwarf Galaxy Next to The Milky Way

Astronomers have stumbled on a black hole roughly 600,000 times more massive than the Sun in a dwarf galaxy next to the Milky Way, according to a new study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Researchers inferred the black hole’s presence from the trajectories of 21 hypervelocity stars zipping through the Milky Way’s outskirts, finding that about half the stars had been flung our way by a black hole within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring our own. This discovery is “the first compelling evidence for a supermassive black hole in [a dwarf] galaxy,” paper author Jiwon Jesse Han from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian tells New Scientist. Although the object is probably too small to be spotted by even the most powerful black hole observatories, it could still help physicists understand the mechanics of black hole formation.