An international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from the NASA / European Space Agency ( ESA ) Hubble Space Telescope span two decades to detect seven fast - move mavin in the innermost region of Omega Centauri , the prominent and brightest globular cluster in the sky . These principal provide compelling raw evidence of the bearing of an medium - mass black yap . ESA / Hubble & NASA , M. Häberle ( MPIA )
There ’s something strange about black holes . Astronomers often find pocket-size black holes , which are between five time and 100 times the deal of the Sunday . And they often find Brobdingnagian supermassive black kettle of fish , which are hundreds of thousands of time the mass of the sun or even big . But they almost never bump dim holesin between those two sizes .
That ’s odd for several rationality , but one picky question it raise is how black holes develop . If they pop out out little and then gradually get bighearted over time , then where are all the medium - sized black holes ? And if they only come in small or immense size , why should that be ? There ’s nothing that we currently know about the cathartic of blackened maw that would prevent average - sized black holes from live .
An international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope spanning two decades to detect seven fast-moving stars in the innermost region of Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. These stars provide compelling new evidence of the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole.ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Häberle (MPIA)
So for class , astronomers have been searching for these elusive intermediate - mass black hole ( IMBH ) . Now , the Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered some of the most compelling grounds to date of an IMBH within the Milky Way in the bunch of Omega Centauri .
This clustering is made up of around 10 million stars , and stargazer have been mold on cataloguing these whiz using Hubble images . And while they were cataloguing , they acknowledge something odd . “ We chance upon seven stars that should not be there , ” said lead researcher Maximilian Häberle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany in astatement . “ They are go so fast that they should escape the cluster and never come back . The most likely account is that a very massive object is gravitationally displume on these stars and keeping them near to the center .
“ The only object that can be so monolithic is a disastrous hole , with a mess at least 8,200 times that of our sun . ”
That 8,200 frame is crucial because it put the physical object firmly in the IMBH size cooking stove . late study have hinted that there could be an IMBH in this region before , but this is the best evidence yet — and it points to a relatively nearby IMBH that could be study further to ascertain more about black hole evolution .
Now , the researchers require to study this black hole in more point using the James Webb Space Telescope to learn about its exact pile and position .
The research is publish in the journalNature .
