{"id":91952,"date":"2024-07-10T15:07:08","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T15:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/10\/a-middleweight-black-hole-has-been-spotted-for-the-first-time-in-our-galaxy\/"},"modified":"2024-07-10T15:07:08","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T15:07:08","slug":"a-middleweight-black-hole-has-been-spotted-for-the-first-time-in-our-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/10\/a-middleweight-black-hole-has-been-spotted-for-the-first-time-in-our-galaxy\/","title":{"rendered":"A middleweight black hole has been spotted for the first time in our galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/071024_lg_intermediate-black-hole_feat.jpg?fit=800%2C450&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"A middleweight black hole has been spotted for the first time in our galaxy\" title=\"A middleweight black hole has been spotted for the first time in our galaxy\" \/><\/div> \r\n<br><br><div style=\"clear:both\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.subscribe-cta {\n  color: black;\n  margin-top: 0px;\n  background-color: #D5DDEE;\n  background-size: cover;\n  padding: 20px;\n  border: 1px solid black;\n  border-top: 5px solid black;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n.centered {\n  text-align:center;\n  margin:auto;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n<!-- \/wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"subscribe-cta\"} -->\n<div id=\"subscribeConversion\" class=\"wp-block-group subscribe-cta\"><!-- wp:heading {\"textAlign\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"2em\"}}} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:2em\">Take our AI Survey<\/h2>\n<!-- \/wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"1.1em\"}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:1.1em\"><em>Science News <\/em>has partnered with <a href=\"https:\/\/trustingnews.org\/about-us\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Trusting News<\/a> to gather feedback on the potential use of AI in journalism. <strong>Currently, we do not publish any content produced by generative AI<\/strong> (see our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/about-science-news\/journalism-standards-practices#ai-policy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">policy<\/a>). We do want to hear your views on how <em>Science News<\/em> could use AI responsibly.  Let us know by participating in a short 10 question survey.<\/p>\n<!-- \/wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:spacer {\"height\":\"20px\"} -->\n\n<!-- \/wp:spacer -->\n\n<!-- wp:buttons {\"className\":\"centered\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"justifyContent\":\"center\"}} -->\n\n<!-- \/wp:buttons --><\/div>\n<!-- \/wp:group -->\n\n\n<p>Most of the black holes astronomers have detected fall into one of two categories. They\u2019re either stellar-mass black holes, with masses up to about 100 times that of the sun, or supermassive black holes, which reside in the centers of galaxies and clock in at hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Black holes with masses in the middle could help span the gap between the two categories and explain how the supermassive ones got so big. But these black holes are a little like Bigfoot: There have been many <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/middling-black-hole-may-be-hiding-star-cluster\">claimed sightings<\/a>, but most turn out not to be real <em>(SN: 2\/8\/17)<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s this rather wide mass range, between 100 and 100,000 solar masses, where there are only very few detections,\u201d says astronomer Maximilian H\u00e4berle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to find out whether they are there, and we just don\u2019t see them because they are hard to detect. Or maybe there\u2019s also a reason why they don\u2019t exist at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One reason to think midsized black holes should exist is because the supermassive black holes astronomers have spotted in the early universe <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/most-ancient-supermassive-black-hole-quasar-bafflingly-big\">didn\u2019t have time to grow so big<\/a> if they were just eating gas and stars like black holes do today <em>(SN: 1\/18\/21)<\/em>. If those black holes grew from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/black-holes-weird-secrets-early-universe\">mergers of intermediate-mass seeds<\/a>, that could solve the puzzle (<em>SN: 6\/2\/23<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s like a missing link that is needed to explain the existence of the supermassive black holes,\u201d says Texas-based astronomer and data scientist Eva Noyola, who was not involved in the new work. \u201cIf it\u2019s proven that [intermediate-mass black holes] happen in dense stellar clusters, you have a solution there that\u2019s pretty elegant and simple.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So astronomers have been hunting for midsize black holes for decades, and searching Omega Centauri specifically since at least 2008. As the most massive cluster of stars in the Milky Way, it\u2019s a relatively easy spot to search, and it may be the remnant core of another galaxy that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/milky-way-feasted-smaller-galaxy-10-billion-years-ago\">merged with the Milky Way about 10 billion years ago<\/a> <em>(SN: 11\/1\/18)<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s basically a galactic nucleus frozen in time,\u201d says study coauthor Nadine Neumayer, also of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Its black hole could be representative of all small galaxies\u2019 black holes 10 billion years ago. \u201cIt tells us immediately something about the seed mass for black holes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But previous studies left it unclear whether Omega Centauri hosted a single medium-size black hole, or a bunch of smaller black holes close together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Using 20 years of Hubble Space Telescope observations, H\u04d3berle and colleagues tracked the motions of 1.4 million individual stars in the cluster and searched for stars moving faster than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The team found seven stars zipping around the innermost regions of the cluster at speeds between 66 and 113 kilometers per second \u2014 speeds that should have rocketed the stars out of the cluster altogether. The only way those stars could remain in the cluster is if a single massive object is holding them close, the team concludes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>The observations of superfast stars, combined with other observations through the years, should resolve the debate about the black hole in Omega Centauri, says Noyola, who was on the team that first claimed to see the black hole in 2008 and faced skepticism when they reported the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It wasn\u2019t until over a decade later that astronomers nabbed undeniable evidence of an intermediate mass black hole. The first solid detection came from the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, which recorded ripples in spacetime shaken off after two smaller black holes merged to form <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/physics-gravitational-waves-midsize-black-hole-collision-ligo-virgo\">a single black hole with about 142 solar masses<\/a> (<em>SN: 9\/2\/20)<\/em>. But that collision occurred about 17 billion light-years from Earth, making it challenging to study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Omega Centauri\u2019s black hole has two advantages over that one, from an astronomer\u2019s perspective: It\u2019s in our galactic neighborhood, and astronomers can continue to observe it. H\u04d3berle and his colleagues are planning to use the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, to get more information on the orbiting stars\u2019 speeds, which will let them put <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stsci.edu\/jwst\/science-execution\/program-information?id=5137\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">better limits on the black hole\u2019s mass<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another group, led by astrophysicist Oleg Kargaltsev at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is using JWST <a href=\"https:\/\/ui.adsabs.harvard.edu\/abs\/2023jwst.prop.4343K\/abstract\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">to look for light emitted by super-hot gas flowing into the black hole<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt will be a completely independent, very different method of proving that there is an intermediate-mass black hole,\u201d Kargaltsev says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/middleweight-black-hole-spotted-galaxy\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Take our AI Survey Science News has partnered with Trusting News to gather feedback on the potential use of AI in journalism. Currently, we do not publish any content produced by generative AI (see our policy). We do want to hear your views on how Science News could use AI responsibly. Let us know by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/071024_lg_intermediate-black-hole_feat.jpg?fit=800%2C450&ssl=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[5831,2845,8303,78739,4743,222],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91954,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91952\/revisions\/91954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}