2023-05-26 02:00:12
The Hubble Space Telescope may have found a rare ‘missing link’ black hole hiding in Earth’s cosmic backyard.
Located roughly 6,000 light-years away in the heart of neighboring star cluster Messier 4, the intermediate-mass black hole is a super-dense region of space filled with the mass of 800 suns, causing nearby stars to spin around it like “bees swarm around it.” cell,” according to the researchers who discovered it.
“It’s too small for us to be able to explain other than it being a single black hole,” said the study’s lead author. Eduardo Vitralan astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said V.A statement. “Alternatively, there may be a stellar mechanism that we know nothing about, at least in current physics.”
Related: The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest black hole in the universe – a cosmic monster 10 million times heavier than the sun
black holes They are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by devouring gas, dust, stars and other black holes. Right now, known black holes tend to fall into two general categories: stellar-mass black holes, which range from a few to a few tens of times the mass of the sun, and supermassive black holes, cosmic beasts that can be anywhere from a few million to 50. billion times the mass of the Sun.
Intermediate-mass black holes — which theoretically range from 100 to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun — are the most elusive black holes in the universe. while there Many promising candidatesThe existence of intermediate mass black holes has not been conclusively confirmed.
This poses a puzzle to astronomers. If black holes grow from stellar size to gigantic size by devouring themselves in an endless feeding frenzy, the lack of confirmed sightings of black holes in their awkward adolescence points to an even larger hole in our understanding of cosmic beasts.
To search for signs of a lurking intermediate-mass black hole, the authors of the new study pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the Messier 4 globular star cluster. Globular clusters are clumps of tens of thousands to millions of tightly packed stars, many of which are among the oldest ever to form in Earth’s history. our universe. We have approximately 180 globular clusters spread out milky way The galaxy, and because it has such a high concentration of mass in its centers, is an ideal ground for teenage black holes.
Messier 4 is the closest globular cluster to Earth. Using the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, the researchers used 12 years of data to pinpoint the stars in the cluster and study their motions around their center. By applying physical models to how these stars move, the researchers discovered that the stars were moving around something massive and undetectable directly at the cluster’s center.
“We have good confidence that we have a very small area with a lot of concentrated mass,” Vitral said. “It’s about three times smaller than the denser dark mass we’ve found before in other globular clusters.”
The region the researchers found was much tighter than they would have expected if its intense gravity had been caused by other dense stellar bodies, such as neutron stars and white dwarfs, and it would take 40 stellar-mass black holes packed into space a tenth of a light-year to make the stars orbit them so intensely.
“The consequences are that they will be integrated and/or expelled into the game of interstellar pinball,” the researchers wrote in the statement.
To ensure that they’ve detected an intermediate-mass black hole and haven’t accidentally discovered some new physics, the researchers said more observations should be made, possibly using the James Webb Space Telescope in conjunction with Hubble.
“Science is rarely about discovering something new in a single moment. It is more about ascertaining a step-by-step result, and this may be one step towards confirming the existence of intermediate-mass black holes.” Timo Brostia project scientist at the Gaia telescope said in the statement.
The researchers published their findings May 23 in the journal Nature Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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