Abstract
Conventional wisdom tells us that supermassive black holes are found exclusively in massive galaxies undergoing little star formation. But one such object has now been discovered in a star-forming dwarf galaxy. See Letter p.66 The starburst in Henize 2-10, a relatively nearby blue compact dwarf galaxy, has attracted the attention of astronomers for decades, in part because of its prodigious rate of star formation — ten times that of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Now a study of Henize 2-10 at centimetre radio wavelengths and in the near-infrared reveals a compact radio source at its centre that is spatially coincident with a hard X-ray source. This points to the presence of an actively accreting massive black hole, but one not associated with a bulge, a nuclear star cluster or any other well-defined nucleus. This means that Henize 2-10 may reflect an early phase of black hole and galaxy evolution that has not been observed previously.
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