A new study has explored whether dwarf spheroidal galaxies orbiting the Milky Way may host black holes, offering insights into black hole formation and galaxy evolution.
While large galaxies commonly host supermassive black holes at their centres, detecting them in dwarf galaxies is difficult due to their faintness, low gas content, and dominance of dark matter.
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, K. Aditya and Arun Mangalam, developed dynamical models incorporating stars, dark matter halos, and potential central black holes, using stellar motion data to estimate possible black hole masses.
Their results place strong upper limits on black hole masses in these galaxies, generally below one million solar masses, though intermediate-mass black holes remain possible.
The study also establishes a unified relation between black hole mass and stellar velocity dispersion across galaxy types, suggesting a common scaling law, albeit with greater uncertainty at lower masses.
The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, are consistent with theoretical models of black hole growth through gas accretion, stellar capture, and tidal stripping, and provide a framework for future observations using next-generation telescopes like NLOT and the ELT.
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