Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A black hole at the center of a nearby dwarf galaxy, called NGC 4395, is about 40 times smaller than previously thought, according to astronomers.
“The question remains open for small or dwarf galaxies: Do these galaxies have black holes, and if they do, do they scale the same way as supermassive black holes?” University of Michigan astronomer Elena Gallo said in a press release.
Light echo measured from the central black hole in a dwarf galaxy NGC 4395. The time delay between the continuum from the black hole’s accretion disk (blue light curve) and the hydrogen emission from orbiting gas clouds (red light curve) is measured as ~80 min., providing the light travel time from the black hole to the gas emission region. Credit for NGC 4395 image: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona. Credit for accretion disk illustration: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M. Weiss.
“Answering these questions might help us understand the very mechanism through which these monster black holes were assembled when the universe was in its infancy.”
To determine the mass of NGC’s black hole, Gallo and her fellow researchers measured mass by monitoring radiation thrown off by what’s called an accretion disk around the black hole. An accretion disk is a mass of matter collected by the gravitational pull of black holes.
By measuring how long it takes for the accretion disk radiation to hit the broad-line region and cause these flashes, the astronomers can estimate how far the broad-line region is from the black hole. Using this information, they can then calculate the black hole’s mass.
“The distance is thought to depend on the black hole mass,” Gallo said. “The larger the black hole, the larger the distance and the longer you expect for light to be emitted from the accretion disk to hit the broad-line region.”
Using data from the MDM Observatory, the astronomers calculated that it took about 83 minutes, give or take 14 minutes, for radiation to reach the broad-line region from the accretion disk.
To calculate the black hole mass, they also had to measure the intrinsic speed of the broad-line region, which is the speed at which the region cloud is moving under the influence of the black hole gravity. To do this, they took a high-quality spectrum with the GMOS spectrometer on GEMINI North telescope.
By knowing this number, the speed of the broad-line region, the speed of light and what’s called the gravitational constant, or a measure of gravitational force, the astronomers were able to determine that the black hole’s mass was about 10,000 times the mass of our sun—about 40 times lighter than previously thought. This is also the smallest black hole found via reverberation mapping.
“This regime of dwarf galaxies is largely unexplored when it comes to the properties of their nuclear black holes,” Gallo said. “We don’t even know if every galaxy has a black hole. This adds a new member to the family of black holes we have information about,” Gallo said.
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff