New research of A team in the Harvard Center for Astrophysics indicates that the great Magellanian cloud, a dwarf galaxer adjacent to the Milky Road, offers hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole.

The most accepted theory of galactic evolution is that super -massive black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. Until now, there was no reason to suggest that a small group like the large Magellanian cloud could offer one. When X-ray telescopes or observatories were trained on smaller clusters such as the large magellanic cloud, they found no signatures associated with the black hole activity.

But then came the hypervelocity stars. Astronomers have seen stars for almost 20 years with enough acceleration to put out of their own galaxies. While a traditional star moves about 100 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star moves up to ten times faster. Experts believe that such stars appear by ‘outward’ outward ‘by a super -massive gravitational printing under the Hills mechanism – where a binary star system interacts with a black hole, with one star trapped by the black hole and throwing the other away from it.

Within the Milky Way itself, there are hypervelocity stars that probably originated here. Studies indicate that they were accelerated by Sagittarius A*, the super -massive black hole in the middle of the galaxy. But at least 21 Hypervelocity stars detected correspond to a super -massive black hole, but cannot be linked to the intrinsic activity of the Milky Way. In the simulations of the team, it is plausible that these stars come from the great Magellanian cloud instead.

For the team, led by Jiwon Jesse Han, this is one of the first important evidence for the presence of a super -massive black hole in our neighboring dwarf galaxy. According to the initial calculations of the team, this black -hole structure can be between 251,000 and 1 million solar masses. The average mass is 600,000 times as large as the sun.

The study – which is currently proposed but must be published in the astrophysical magazine – used data from the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency, whose purpose is to map millions of stars to calculate their motion.

Of course, there may be other explanations for the phenomenon. Stars that escape from their galaxies can also come from a supernova or any other energetic mechanism that is powerful enough to throw it out. However, the authors of the article explain that this is not the case with the hypervelocity stars that seem to come from the great Magellanian cloud.

The large Magellanian cloud is an irregularly shaped galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, along with other dwarf stars, such as Sagittarius, Carina or Draco. It is 163,000 light years of the earth and has a diameter of about 14,000 light years. Astronomers believe that the large Magellanian cloud and the Milky Way in the distant future – in about 2.4 billion years – along with other larger structures, such as the Andromeda galaxy, will merge into a single larger group. Experts believe that the merger process will be slow and have no problems on a planet scale.

This story originally appears on Wire And Español and was translated from Spanish.