Hubble telescope may have discovered a rare 'intermediate-sized' black hole
What's the story
'Intermediate-sized' black holes are particularly difficult to spot but NASA's Hubble Space Telescope may have just found one.
Astronomers say that they have gathered the "best evidence yet" for the presence of a rare class of intermediate-sized black holes.
What's more, this cosmic object is said to be present in a globular star cluster located 6,000 light-years away from Earth.
Context
Why does this story matter?
Astronomers have been studying black holes for years and yet there are some things we are not entirely sure about. One of them is the intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH).
With the help of the Hubble telescope, which is claimed to be one of the first major optical telescopes to be put in space, scientists could get significant insights into these elusive cosmic objects.
Explanation
Black holes are broadly classified into three categories
Generally, black holes fall under three categories based on mass: stellar mass, supermassive, and intermediate-mass.
The universe is said to be filled with supermassive black holes, which weigh millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun.
Meanwhile, stellar-mass black holes, form when stars several times more massive than our Sun reach the end of their lives and collapse on themselves.
IMBH
Hubble telescope has helped discover IMBH before
IMBH weigh anywhere between 100 and 100,000 solar masses. The hunt for these elusive cosmic objects has heated up in recent years. Hubble has helped spot potential IMBH before.
One is 3XMM J215022.4−055108 which the telescope helped discover in 2020, and the other is HLX-1, identified back in 2009.
Each of these black holes could have masses equivalent to tens of thousands of suns.
Hubble
"You can't do this kind of science without Hubble"
In the recent study, the team used Hubble to examine the core of a globular star cluster called Messier 4 (M4) in hopes of finding a black hole. With the help of Hubble's "unique capabilities," the team hoped to achieve "higher precision than in previous searches."
"You can't do this kind of science without Hubble," said Eduardo Vitral, the lead author of the study.
Observations
The M4 black hole is 800 times the Sun's mass
Researchers estimate that the black hole in M4 could be 800 times our Sun's mass.
They estimated the mass of the black hole by studying the motion of stars trapped in the gravitational field of the suspected spatial body.
"Measuring their motion takes time and a lot of precision," said NASA.
"That's where Hubble accomplishes what no other present-day telescope can do."
Information
Researchers have ruled out other possibilities of the black hole
Data from Hubble has allowed the scientists to rule out other possible theories for the black hole detected in M4, "like a compact central cluster of unresolved stellar remnants like neutron stars, or smaller black holes swirling around each other."
Claims
It is a single black hole
"While we cannot completely affirm that it is a central point of gravity, we can show that it is very small. It's too tiny for us to be able to explain other than it being a single black hole," said Vitral.
"Alternatively, there might be a stellar mechanism we simply don't know about, at least within current physics," he added.