You can see that as the yellow (radio) blobs to the left and right of the black hole's location in the big picture at the top, or as the pink areas in this smaller inset image of the galaxy (which just shows the Hubble image only). In this case, these beams have slammed into material hundreds of light years away, well outside the core of Henize 2-10, lighting this gas up at different wavelengths. So it's pretty weird that Henize 2-10 has a supermassive black hole at all, but it turns out the hole is also about a million times the mass of the Sun - that's pretty freakin' big for such a tiny galaxy! That's 1/4 the mass of our own black hole, in a galaxy that itself is far smaller than ours.Īs I wrote earlier today, black holes can focus and expel tremendous beams of matter and energy which blast away from the hole. When you look at lots of big galaxies, there's a pretty clear overall correlation between the mass of the black hole and the galaxy around it. The thinking for big galaxies is that the black hole forms at the same time as the galaxy itself, and to regulate the growth of each other. Henize 2-10, as you can see, it a mess! It doesn't have much overall structure, which is why it's classified as an irregular galaxy. Some smaller galaxies have supermassive black holes as well, but in general these dwarf galaxies have some structure to them, with a well-defined core. Many galaxies have much larger ones, like Andromeda which harbors one 35 times as massive as ours. Now, we know that big galaxies like ours have these monster black holes in their very centers the Milky Way's is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. It's about 30 million light years away, which is kinda sorta close by, at least close enough to get a decent look at it. Henize 2-10 is pretty dinky, only about 3000 light years across - the Milky Way is 100,000 for comparison. The cross marks the location of the black hole. The image is a composite of images from Hubble (red, green, and blue), radio images from the Very Large Array in New Mexico (yellow), and X-rays from the Chandra Observatory (purple).
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