A star cluster may contain an intermediate black hole

another filter for average black hole It was found by the Hubble Telescope. Located in a star cluster just 6,000 light-years from Earth, the object appears to have about 800 solar masses. If this is confirmed, the mystery of intermediate-mass black holes will be over.

So far, astronomers have found small black holes, down to a few dozen solar masses, and supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. However, nothing with intermediate-sized black holes has been confirmed.

in the past, Some candidates have been revealed by telescopes such as Hubble and James Webb, but none of them can be confirmed due to lack of data – not least because many of them are in galaxies very far away from our own.

This time, the candidate is in our own Milky Way, just 6,000 light-years away. Their “neighborhood” is a globular cluster called Messier 4, which is located in the constellation Scorpius and has more than 100,000 stars. Of these, 40,000 are expected to be white dwarfs (some of which are highlighted in the video below).

To find a supermassive black hole candidate, the authors of the new study analyzed data from 12 years of Hubble observations and realized that the orbits of the stars point to a central object — the putative black hole. In other words, the stars appear to revolve around a very massive object.

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The motion of these stars can also determine the mass of the central body, which is estimated to be about 800 times that of the Sun. The problem is that there is still a chance that this filter is actually a bunch of small, dense objects, right next to each other.

Huge amount of leftovers “dead” stars White dwarfs and neutron stars, for example, are the remnants of extinct stars, as are the mini black holes themselves – casting some doubts about the nature of the intermediate black hole candidate.

On the other hand, if the candidate is a cluster of white dwarfs and/or Neutron stars, the distance between them would be so small that they would probably collide now. Therefore, the study authors are confident that it is indeed an intermediate black hole.

However, a little caution is always needed. The authors said that although they cannot claim that it is a Black hole Average, it is possible to show that it is small enough that this is the best explanation for the observations.

The article about the discovery has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

source: MNRASAnd European Space Agency/Hubble

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