New research suggests that not all feeding massive black holes sit stably at the heart of their home galaxies. A team of astronomers has discovered a black hole wandering through its home dwarf galaxy, taking its active region with it. Making this discovery even more remarkable is the fact that this is an intermediate-mass black hole, a type of object that has eluded astronomers for decades.
The discovery that black hole growth may not be limited to galactic centers could shed light on the role supermassive black holes, with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun, play in the evolution of their host galaxies, as well as indicating how these cosmic titans grew so large so rapidly in the early universe.
