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Scientists have reported the discovery of a rare, medium-sized black hole that could help answer one of astronomy’s most tantalizing questions: How do their supermassive counterparts come into being?
There are two well-known sizes of black holes – on one end, the so-called star-class ones which are typically three to ten times the mass of our Sun – and on the other, the supermassive ones, found in the centers of most galaxies. , including the Milky Way, which are millions to billions of times heavier.
The recently detected ‘golden loops’ black hole – around 55,000 solar masses – could be a missing link between these two extremes, scientists in the journal suggested on Monday Nature astronomy.
So far, only a handful of black holes of intermediate mass – between 100 and 100,000 solar masses – have been detected, and none have been squarely in the middle of that range.
A black hole is a celestial object that squeezes a huge mass into an extremely small space. Their gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light.
Star-class black holes form when a dying star collapses, but astronomers have yet to understand the origin story of the biggest matter-eating monsters.
“How can we get so many supermassive black holes in the Universe?” asked co-author Rachel Webster, professor at the University of Melbourne.
Lead author Eric Thrane, a professor at Monash University, said the recently discovered black hole “may be an ancient relic, a primordial black hole created before the formation of the first stars and galaxies.”
“These early black holes may be the seeds of the supermassive black holes that now live in the heart of galaxies.”
Born like this?
The new specimen was observed indirectly through a slight deflection of light from a stellar explosion at the start of the Universe, some 8 billion light years away.
Using a technique developed by Webster, astronomers analyzed thousands of these gamma-ray bursts – caused either by the violent collapse of one star or by the merger of two stars – for signs of gravitational lens.
This happens when an object – in this case, the intermediate black hole – acts like a lens and fleetingly bends the path of light as it travels toward Earth, so that astronomers see the same flash twice.
While Thrane, Webster, and lead author James Paynter, a doctoral candidate, were able to accurately measure the mass of their intermediate black hole, they could only speculate on how it had formed.
“Overall there are three possibilities,” Webster told AFP.
It could have been forged from the merger between two small black holes, as was the case with another much smaller intermediate black hole discovered in May 2019.
Alternatively, it could have been born as a star-class black hole and slowly build up mass by sucking material into its mouth.
“But it’s a slow process,” Webster said. “It is difficult to grow supermassive black holes from a seed of solar mass during the age of the Universe.”
A more likely scenario is that their discovery “was born that way,” she said. “That might provide the answer.”
The authors believe there are around 40,000 intermediate black holes in our galaxy alone.
Gravitational waves capable of bending light – allowing detection of black holes – were first measured in September 2015, earning leading scientists a Nobel Prize in Physics two years later.
Albert Einstein anticipated gravitational waves in his General Theory of Relativity, which hypothesized that they propagate through the Universe at the speed of light.
© Agence France-Presse
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