Scientists SHUDDER!(BHQ1) Milky Way’s Dark Secret: A BLACK HOLE We Never Knew Existed!

BHQ1, Potential evidence of a nearby black hole with a mass at least 8,200 times that of Sun has been found by astronomers. By looking over two decades’ worth of photos from Hubble Space Telescope archives, this discovery was made.

This black hole would be second largest ever discovered in our galaxy if additional research confirms its existence. The results, which were released in Nature, point to this object as the most promising candidate for an intermediate-mass black hole to date. Between supermassive black holes, which are assumed to be located at the centers of most galaxies and much smaller black holes with masses similar to big stars, intermediate-mass black holes occupy a special place in the universe.

Approximately 18,000 light years away from the Solar System, ω Centauri is a dense cluster of 10 million stars that can be seen in over 500 photographs that astronomer Maximilian Häberle and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, examined. Over the years, these photos were mostly taken to calibrate Hubble’s sensors.

With the use of these combined photos, the researchers were able to follow the motion of almost 150,000 stars in the cluster. The majority of stars exhibited typical behavior, traveling in line with theoretical predictions. Seven stars close to ω Centauri’s center, however, were moving more quickly than the cluster’s gravity could account for, according to Häberle.

This extraordinary speed implied that a huge object, probably a black hole, was exerting gravitational force on the stars. The object in question would have to be at least 8,200 times as massive as the Sun, or as much as 50,000 solar masses, based on the velocity of the stars. Häberle stated, “We did not know before whether we would find it or not,” in acknowledgment of the ambiguity surrounding their findings. We might not have discovered anything, so there was a small risk involved.”

Mysterious middleweights (BHQ1)

Candidate object’s mass in ω Centauri is within mass range of intermediate-mass black holes, which typically have masses between 100 and 100,000 times that of the Sun. Gravitational waves from two black hole mergers have been detected, which is now only conclusive evidence for black holes in this range. For instance- it is thought that an event in 2019 produced a black hole with a mass of roughly 150 solar masses.

Numerous claims made in search for midsize black holes have now been refuted. At first, astronomers thought that some sources of ultraluminous X-rays might be black holes in this wavelength range. Majority of these candidates, however, turned out to be neutron stars that were scorching material from a companion star and blazing brightly. Astrophysicist Giuseppina Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says these are probably related to typical young binary systems.

Important concerns remain, including how certain black holes form through numerous mergers from stellar-mass black holes to intermediate masses like the ω Centauri candidate, and how some black holes become supermassive.

Group intends to use James Webb Space Telescope to perform additional spectroscopic investigations. Astronomers can fully reconstruct stars’ velocities in three dimensions by using their spectra, which depict stars’ motion along the line of sight while Hubble data only shows stars’ movements across field of vision.

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FAQ

Does the Milky Way have a black hole?

Yes, the Milky Way has a newly discovered black hole close to Earth. This black hole, found using the European space telescope Gaia, is a stellar-mass black hole. These types of black holes form when a large star exhausts its fuel and collapses.

How many stars were catalogued to find the black hole in the Milky Way?

Astronomers catalogued 1.4 million stars to find the black hole, which is located 18,000 light-years from our Solar System in the Milky Way.

Can you see a black hole in a star cluster?

No, black holes can’t be observed directly because their gravity pulls in everything, including light.

Is there a way to detect a black hole in a star cluster?

Yes, astrophysicists look for signs of a black hole by studying the movements of stars around it. For example, in Omega Centauri, a densely packed cluster of millions of stars located about 17,000 light years away, researchers analyze the stars’ movements to find evidence of a black hole.