NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) may have discovered the "seeds that can eventually sprout into a black hole billions of times the mass of our Sun.
Researchers looked at black holes in smaller "dwarf" galaxies which have not undergone much change over the years, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release reported. These galaxies can resemble the early days of the universe, and allow researchers to peer into the "nurseries" of super-massive black holes.
WISE has discovered hundreds of dwarf galaxies that could be hiding black holes. These objects could be between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of our Sun, which is exceptionally large for residing in such a small "dwarf" galaxy.
"Our findings suggest the original seeds of supermassive black holes are quite massive themselves," Shobita Satyapal of George Mason University, Fairfax, Va. Satyapal is lead author of a paper, said in the news release.
"Though it will take more research to confirm whether the dwarf galaxies are indeed dominated by actively feeding black holes, this is exactly what WISE was designed to do: find interesting objects that stand out from the pack," Daniel Stern, an astronomer specializing in black holes at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who did not participate in the study, said in the news release.
A past theory of black hole growth suggested that the objects get larger when galaxies collide; researchers believe galaxies could "merge" with each other, causing their resident black holes to merge as well. This would cause the black holes to get larger.
The discovery of large black holes in smaller galaxies disputes this past theory. Instead of forming through galactic collisions, black holes could have formed early in the universe's history, or could grow by feeding off nearby gas.
"We still don't know how the monstrous black holes that reside in galaxy centers formed," Satyapal said. "But finding big black holes in tiny galaxies shows us that big black holes must somehow have been created in the early universe, before galaxies collided with other galaxies."
