Because they emit nothing we can detect, there are many things about black holes we simply do not know.
Another possibility is that, in the early Universe, huge, dense clouds of gas and dust directly collapsed down into larger black holes tens of thousands of times the mass of the Sun, creating a larger starting point from which supermassive black holes can grow.
And this gives us a method to tease out the likelihoods of each scenario, because the direct collapse model is a rare process. This means we could expect relatively few dwarf galaxies to contain supermassive black holes, compared to the stellar seed model. There's a catch, though. It's really hard to see core black holes in dwarf galaxies. In larger galaxies, astronomers can use the orbit of the stars in the center to infer the central black hole, but dwarf galaxies are too small and dim for this.
The other method is to look for extremely bright, high-energy radiation, such as X-rays. This suggests a black hole that is actively accreting material, heating it to such insane temperatures that it blasts out high-energy light. The researchers did exactly this, using the Chandra X-ray observatory to study eight dwarf galaxies that optical data suggested might be harboring an active supermassive black hole. Only Mrk 462 showed the X-ray signature of a feeding supermassive black hole, with a mass around 200,000 times that of the Sun.But there was something peculiar, too. The ratio of high-energy X-rays to low-energy X-rays suggested that the black hole was heavily obscured, or"buried", by a thick cloud of dust.
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