{"id":244859,"date":"2026-10-03T01:45:41","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T06:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/black-holes-may-grow-quietly-alongside-galaxies-even-without-violent-mergers"},"modified":"2026-10-03T01:45:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T06:45:41","slug":"black-holes-may-grow-quietly-alongside-galaxies-even-without-violent-mergers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/black-holes-may-grow-quietly-alongside-galaxies-even-without-violent-mergers","title":{"rendered":"Black holes may grow quietly alongside galaxies even without violent mergers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/black-holes-may-grow-quietly-alongside-galaxies-even-without-violent-mergers2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers analyzed 2,435 galaxies hosting actively feeding black holes using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Among them, they identified 546 \u201cbulgeless\u201d galaxies\u2014systems with little or no central stellar bulge. Their paper, <a href=\"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/mnras\/advance-article\/doi\/10.1093\/mnras\/stag1783\/8825389\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society<\/i>, suggests that galaxies without a central bulge grow black holes just as effectively as galaxies that have one\u2014a surprising sign that black holes don\u2019t need galaxy mergers to grow normally.<\/p>\n<p>There is a well-established relationship between a galaxy\u2019s central black hole mass and properties of its host galaxy, such as the bulge mass, total mass in stars and the spread of different velocities within the galaxy. These relationships suggest that the galaxy\u2019s black hole and the galaxy evolve together.<\/p>\n<p>Two things have recently complicated the picture of this coevolution and what drives it. First, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found black holes at high redshift that appear \u201ctoo big\u201d for their host galaxies compared to what relationships in the local universe predict. Second, JWST also found far more disk galaxies at high redshift than expected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers analyzed 2,435 galaxies hosting actively feeding black holes using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Among them, they identified 546 \u201cbulgeless\u201d galaxies\u2014systems with little or no central stellar bulge. Their paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that galaxies without a central bulge grow black holes just as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}