The unexpected awakening of these previously “asleep” black holes could tell us more about the smallest supermassive black holes in the universe, if you consider small to mean anywhere between 100,000 and 10 million times the mass of our Sun.
“Most of the smaller galaxies out there are usually missed in our searches because they are fainter,” Arcodia, who led a study recently published in
Nature, told SYFY WIRE. “The co-evolution of supermassive black holes with their host galaxies is usually more known and studied for galaxies bigger than the Milky Way and black holes more massive than the one at its center.”