Scientists have proposed a way to detect a supermassive black hole in the dwarf galaxy Leo I. A paper on this has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Leo I is a dwarf satellite galaxy 820,000 light-years from the Milky Way. From Earth, it is observed at one point in the sky adjacent to the bright star Regulus and is therefore difficult to observe.

Scientists suggest that at the center of this galaxy is a supermassive black hole similar to that produced by the Sagittarius A* radio source at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers came to this conclusion because the stars accelerated as they approached the center of Leo I, but it was thought impossible to get a direct view of this object.

Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found a way to do this. The black hole itself cannot be seen, but many other black holes are illuminated by the accretion disk of hot gas. The Leo I galaxy has very little gas and dust, so the putative black hole remains invisible. The scientists made calculations and learned that although there is no gas, there are many red giants around the black hole, where stellar winds blow constantly and take on a lot of mass. According to the new study, this mass should be enough to form a luminous disk at some intervals.

To test this hypothesis, astronomers were given operating hours of the Chandra space X-ray observatory and the Very Large Array radio telescope in Mexico.