Monday, October 10, 2011

Which came first: The galaxy or the black hole?

The relationship between a galaxy and its black hole is as mystifying as any of those found among families on Earth.

Scientists don't even know which came first — galaxies or their black holes, those regions of space so dense with matter that even photons of light fall prey to their gravitational jaws.

Scrambling the cosmic conundrum anew is a discovery of small dwarf galaxies with giant black holes, a finding that upends currently held theories of galaxy formation.

Previous studies showed that as a galaxy grows and evolves, its black hole seems to grow and evolve too, at least for the big clusters.

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers now find that some small galaxies in the distant universe have disproportionately sized black holes.


 


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