Astronomers spot 'missing link' black hole
- Posted By
10Pointer
- Categories
Science & Technology
- Published
8th Apr, 2020
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- Scientists have detected a mid-size black hole - considered the “missing link” in the understanding of these celestial brutes - eviscerating an unfortunate star that strayed too close.
- Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and two X-ray observatories, the researchers determined that this black hole is more than 50,000 times the mass of our sun and located 740 million light years from Earth in a dwarf galaxy, one containing far fewer stars than our Milky Way.
- Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects possessing gravitational pulls so powerful that not even light can escape.
- This is one of the few “intermediate-mass” black holes ever identified, being far smaller than the supermassive black holes that reside at the center of large galaxies but far larger than so-called stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive individual stars.
- The star was probably roughly a third the mass of the sun.
- The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is 4 million times the mass of the sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth.
- The closest stellar-mass black star is about 6,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
