Wednesday, 23 December 2009

Could supermassive black holes form in dwarf galaxies?

The prediction was that dwarf galaxies have SMBHs, but with smaller masses than regular galaxies. This was based on the idea that regular galaxies were built from dwarf galaxies and the BHs need to have started growing early on. Also the correlation between bulge mass and BH mass requires the BHs to come from the building blocks. A recent paper at arxiv detects 28 AGN in dwarf galaxies with BHs in the $10^3 - 10^4 M_{odot}$ mass range.

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