Where does the supermassive black hole ‘Mirach’s Ghost’ come from?


About 10 million light years from Earth, a fuzzy galaxy called Mirach’s Ghost can help unravel a dark mystery: where the universe’s largest black holes come from. But this ghostly galaxy has also deepened the mystery surrounding the births of these objects.

A black hole is a singularity, a region in space time where matter has become too dense to support itself and has collapsed into a point without form. Supermassive black holes (SMBH) are cosmic monsters, often weighing billions of times the mass of our sun, compared to the mass of heavy stars that form common black holes. They sit in the centers of great galaxies, suck gas and whip stars with their immense gravities. There’s one in the center of the Milky Way galaxy and an even bigger one in the center of the Virgo A galaxy than astronomers have photographed. But it is still unclear how these gigantic objects were formed.