A black hole that survived galaxy destruction

Astronomers have spotted a rare mid-weight black hole some 290 million light-years from Earth which they say offers clues about a now-destroyed galaxy that may once have existed around it.

Researchers at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia who spotted the black hole using the Hubble Space Telescope think the dwarf galaxy was torn apart by the gravity of a larger host galaxy that it orbited.

The violent encounter they would have stripped away most of the dwarf galaxy's stars, but it also could have compressed the gas around its central black hole, triggering a new wave of star formation, LiveScience reported.

The observations suggest that the young stars must be less than 200 million years old, researchers said. "The fact that there's a very young cluster of stars indicates the intermediate-mass black hole may have originated as the central black hole in a very low-mass dwarf galaxy. The dwarf galaxy was then swallowed by the more massive galaxy ," lead researcher Sean Farrell said.