For the first time, we caught two supermassive black holes 'eating' together inside a tiny dwarf galaxy.
April 17, 2026
Original Paper
Euclid: Quick Data Release (Q1) -- Dual AGN in low-mass galaxies
arXiv · 2604.13170
The Takeaway
We know giant galaxies often have two black holes at their center, but we have never seen this in a small galaxy before. This is a big deal because these tiny galaxies are like time capsules from the early universe. Seeing two black holes merging here shows us exactly how the universe's biggest monsters got their start. It is the missing link in our understanding of how galaxies grow from small seeds into the massive spirals we see today. This find confirms that the early universe was a much more crowded and violent place than we thought.
From the abstract
Dual active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are expected in hierarchical galaxy evolution models, in which low-mass galaxies merge to build more massive ones. While observational evidence for dual AGNs is growing in massive galaxies, no clear detection has yet been found in the low-mass regime. We used photometry and spectroscopy from the first \Euclid Quick Data Release, combined with a collection of multi-wavelength data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOF