“I always like to think about the outliers, or the weird little rejects, or the nonconformists.”
Our galaxy’s heart is a gluttonous monster. Like the mythical Kammapa of the Sotho people of southern Africa, the Milky Way’s central, supermassive black hole has swallowed nearly everything around it, growing heftier and heftier the more it eats. And it’s not alone. Black holes weighing as much as thousands, millions or even billions of suns sit at the center of nearly all known massive galaxies.
But others weren’t so certain the oddballs should be cast off. If observations show that these unusual black holes exist in the nearby universe, these astrophysicists speculated, they could be untapped clues to the universe’s infancy and adolescence. The notion remained just an idea for years. But now, the existence of these misfits isn’t so easy to ignore. Astronomers have turned up signs of a number of unexpectedly massive black holes in the universe’s tiniest galaxies, and surprisingly, some of those black holes don’t appear to sit at their galaxies’ centers. Even more intriguing, astronomers have spotted evidence of black holes wandering at their galaxies’ edges, and in rare cases, being kicked from their homes into intergalactic space.
“Without understanding what black holes are doing, you cannot understand galaxy evolution,” says Xiaohui Fan, a cosmologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, making it impossible to explain the landscape of the universe.
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