Galaxies Can Grow Fat Black

¶ … Galaxies Can Grow Fat Black Holes," Shobita Satyapal, one of the lead researchers at George Mason University in Farfax, Virginia, relates that NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, launched from Cape Canaveral on August 25, 2003 and primarily designed to detect infrared energy from cosmic sources with extremely short wavelengths, has recently found "plump black holes where least expected," being skinny or thin galaxies which in the past were not suspected of containing black holes, areas in space with gravitational fields so powerful that not even light can escape from them once it has entered what is known as an event horizon, similar to the edge of a physical hole. For many years, research scientists and astronomers believed that every galaxy "except the slender, bulgeless spirals, harbor supermassive black holes at their cores; however, due to recent observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope, this theory has been thrown into question.

According to Satyapal, part of the reason for the existence of black holes in relatively thin and bulgeless galaxies is due to what is called dark matter, "a mysterious, invisible substance" which is now known to account for much of the overall mass found throughout the universe. As she puts it, "The fact that galaxies without bulges have black holes means that the bulges cannot be the determining factor;" thus, "It's possible that the dark matter that fills the halos around galaxies plays an important role in the early development of supermassive black holes." Since these new findings on the possibility of thin galaxies containing supermassive black holes is so important to the scientific pursuit to understand how our universe operates, Satyapal's study is to be published in the acclaimed Astrophysical Journal in April of 2008.

As compared to these thin galaxies, our own Milky Way galaxy fits into the preconceived notion of containing a massive black hole at its center, much like similar spiral galaxies such as Andromeda which lies some two million light years from Earth. However, unlike other spiral galaxies found scattered throughout the universe, the black hole which is assumed to exist in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is dormant and is not "actively feeding," meaning that it is not currently swallowing up material for some unknown reason. Almost from the beginning of astronomical observations of galactic bodies in the universe, it has always been thought that "the more massive the bulge, the more massive the black hole" which has led scientists and astronomers to reason that "somehow the formation and growth of galaxy bulges and their central black holes are intimately connected." But in 2003 when the Spitzer Space Telescope began to be utilized to collect infrared data from a number of different types of galaxies, scientists discovered that thin or slender galaxies which lack prominent central bulges did indeed contain supermassive black holes.