Astronomers discover supermassive black hole in an ultracompact dwarf galaxy

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.

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Credit: NASA/STScI/ESO/Afanasiev et al.

An optical image of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1399 and its satellite UCD3. Left panel: the image of UCD3 in F606W filter obtained by Hubble telescope. Right panel: an infrared image of UCD3 obtained using the SINFONI spectrograph.

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Astronomers may have discovered the densest galaxy in the nearby Universe. The galaxy, known as M60-UCD1, is located about 54 million light years from Earth. M60-UCD1 is packed with an extraordinary number of stars and this has led scientists to classify it as an "ultra-compact dwarf galaxy." This means that this galaxy is smaller and has more stars than just a regular dwarf galaxy.

M60-UCD1 has the mass about 200 million times our sun and, remarkably, about half of this mass is packed into a radius of just about 80 light years. That translates into the density of stars in this part of M60-UCD1 being about 15,000 times greater than what's found in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky Way.

Dragon wrote:M60-UCD1 has the mass about 200 million times our sun and, remarkably, about half of this mass is packed into a radius of just about 80 light years. That translates into the density of stars in this part of M60-UCD1 being about 15,000 times greater than what's found in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky Way.

Amazing, so much to grasp

All these galaxies.. and some still doubt there's other life forms out there....

That aside, I really enjoy these posts. Aside from the interesting articles the pictures are always so fascinating . I went in a huge planetarium once, it was great.. 3d stars and planets all around, cinematic. I never wanted to come out ~ :drunken: :drunken: such a big kid.

If any of you see a planetarium and have never been in one, go go go you will love it.