Even low-mass galaxies can harbour supermassive black holes

This is a montage of four small, young galaxies taken from a Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 slitless grism sample of 28 low-mass galaxies located 10 billion light-years away in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field region of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS). These colour images were generated from exposures in six different Hubble filters and provide detailed information about the different wavelengths of light coming from the galaxies. Astronomers say this new study gives them a view of galaxies as they appeared when the Universe was less than a quarter of its current age and shows that central black holes formed at an early stage in galaxy evolution.