Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Astronomers have detected an intermediate mass black hole, which is one of over 100 million quiet black holes expected to be lurking in our Galaxy.
A team of astronomers led by Shunya Takekawa at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan noticed HCN–0.009–0.044, a gas cloud moving strangely near the center of the Galaxy 25,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius.
Astronomers used ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) to perform high resolution observations of the cloud and found that it is swirling around an invisible massive object.
“Detailed kinematic analyses revealed that an enormous mass, 30,000 times that of the Sun, was concentrated in a region much smaller than our Solar System,” Shunya Takekawa at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said in a press release.
This and the lack of any observed object at that location strongly suggests an intermediate-mass black hole. By analyzing other anomalous clouds, we hope to expose other quiet black holes.”
“It is significant that this intermediate mass black hole was found only 20 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center,” Tomoharu Oka, a professor at Keio University and coleader of the team, added.
“In the future, it will fall into the supermassive black hole; much like gas is currently falling into it. This supports the merger model of black hole growth.”
Black holes are objects with such strong gravity that everything, including light, is sucked in and cannot escape. Because black holes do not emit light, astronomers must infer their existence from the effects their gravity produces in other objects.
Black holes range in mass from about 5 times the mass of the Sun to supermassive black holes millions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers think that small black holes merge and gradually grow into large ones, but no one had ever found an intermediate mass black hole, hundreds or thousands of times the mass of the Sun.
These results provide a new method to search for other hidden black holes and help us understand the growth and evolution of black holes.
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer