Extraordinary, Intermediate Black Hole Discovered in a Nearby Galaxy
Astronomers have discovered a unique black hole. With a mass one hundred thousand times that of the Sun, it is smaller than the black holes found in the centre of galaxies but larger than the black holes created when stars implode. This makes it one of the only confirmed black holes with an intermediate-mass, an object that astronomers have long been searching for.
Iván Éder, HST ACS/HRC
“We have very good observations of the largest stellar black holes with a mass of up to 100 times the solar mass, and of supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies that have millions of times the mass of our sun. However, there are no measurements of black holes in between, and that is a big gap,” Anil Seth said. “This discovery fills that gap.”
Seth is a professor of astronomy at the University of Utah and the senior author of the study on the discovery.
The black hole was hidden in B023-G078, an enormous cluster in the galaxy closest to us, the Andromeda Nebula. It was long thought that B023-G078 was a globular cluster, but the researchers claim that the object is instead a stripped-down core.
Stripped cores are the remains of small galaxies that have fallen into larger ones and…
