Discovered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2013, the M60-UCD1 is one of the smallest known galaxies, but it also just got a lot more interesting.
NASA has discovered the tiny galaxy is home to a massive black hole. M60-UCD1 is approximately 1/500th of our galaxy’s width but features an incredible 140 million stars.
M60-UCD1’s black hole is huge, five times the mass of the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy! The black hole has a mass equivalent to 21 million suns and makes up 15 percent of the dwarf galaxy’s total mass.
The new finding suggests the possibility that tiny galaxies are leftovers from a collision between galaxies instead of simple small islands of stars born in isolation.
It also leads to the idea that many other dwarf galaxies may exist with even bigger black holes.