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Something Unexpected Is Spewing Stars Into the Milky Way
Fast-moving stars in the Milky Way indicate there could be a supermassive black hole in the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud—something that has never been detected in a smaller galaxy.
New research from a team at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole. For the team, led by Jiwon Jesse Han, this is one of the first major pieces of evidence for the presence of a supermassive black hole in our neighboring dwarf galaxy. The study —which is currently in preprint but is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal—used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, whose purpose is to map millions of stars to calculate their motion.
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