![]() To confirm that they have spotted an intermediate-mass black hole and not accidentally discovered some new physics, the researchers said further observations, possibly using the James Webb Space Telescope alongside Hubble, should be made. "The consequences are that they would merge and/or be ejected in a game of interstellar pinball," the researchers wrote in the statement. The region the researchers found was more compact than they would expect if its intense gravity had been produced by other dense star corpses, like neutron stars and white dwarfs, and it would take 40 stellar-mass black holes packed into a space one-tenth of a light-year across to make the stars orbit them so intensely. What's the biggest black hole in the universe? Black holes may be swallowing invisible matter that slows the movement of stars 'Green Monster' supernova is the youngest in the Milky Way, James Webb telescope reveals "It's about three times smaller than the densest dark mass that we had found before in other globular clusters." "We have good confidence that we have a very tiny region with a lot of concentrated mass," Vitral said. By applying physical models to how these stars moved, the researchers discovered that the stars were moving around something massive and were not directly detectable in the cluster's center. By using the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, the researchers used 12 years of data to pinpoint the stars in the cluster and study their movements around its center. Messier 4 is the closest globular star cluster to Earth. Roughly 180 globular clusters dot our Milky Way galaxy and, because they have a high concentration of mass in their centers, are ideal stomping grounds for adolescent black holes. Globular clusters are clumps of tens of thousands to millions of tightly packed stars, many of which are among the most ancient to have ever formed in our universe. To look for signs of a lurking intermediate-mass black hole, the authors of the new study pointed the Hubble Space Telescope toward the globular star cluster Messier 4. If black holes grow from stellar to supermassive size by gorging themselves in an endless feeding frenzy, the lack of confirmed sightings of black holes in their awkward teenage phases points to an even bigger hole in our understanding of the cosmic monsters. While there have been several promising candidates, no intermediate-mass black holes have been definitively confirmed to exist. ![]() Intermediate-mass black holes - which, theoretically, range from 100 to 100,000 times the sun's mass - are the most elusive black holes in the universe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |