Astronomers are using a space telescope from NASA to search for a rare "intermediate-sized" black hole that is estimated to be in a star cluster 6,000 light years away from Earth.
In space, all black holes appear to come in two different sizes: small and large. However, researchers are searching for a new class of black holes, intermediate-mass black holes, with the Hubble Space Telescope allowing researchers to spot a possible intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 800 solar masses, according to NASA.
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The research team is not able to see the suspected black hole, but they are able to calculate its mass by studying the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field. By doing this, the team estimates the object's mass might be as much as 800 times the sun's mass and has also been able to rule out other theories on what the object might be.
"We have good confidence that we have a very tiny region with a lot of concentrated mass," said Eduardo Vitral, the team's leader. "It's about three times smaller than the densest dark mass that we had found before in other globular clusters. The region is more compact than what we can reproduce with numerical simulations when we take into account a collection of black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs segregated at the cluster's center. They are not able to form such a compact concentration of mass."
Other possible intermediate-mass black holes that have been spotted include 3XMM J215022.4−055108, which Hubble helped discover in 2020, and HLX-1, which was identified in 2009.
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The Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed into space in 1990, and it is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble. Since its launch, the telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations, and over 19,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published based on its discoveries.
Vitral is with the Space Telescope Science Institute located in Baltimore, Maryland. The institute conducts operations with the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the James Webb Space Telescope, and is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, located in Washington, D.C.