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An extraordinary black hole was found in our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—Astronomers find black hole like no other. At one hundred thousand solar masses, it is smaller than the black holes found at the center of galaxies, but larger than the black holes born when stars explode. This makes it the only confirmed medium-mass black hole, an object that astronomers have been searching for for a long time.
“We have excellent detection of black holes with the largest stellar mass up to 100 times the size of our sun, and supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies that are millions of times the size of our sun, but there aren’t any black hole measurements between these. That’s a huge gap, said senior author Anil Seth, professor of astronomy at the University of Utah and co-author of the study, as reported Tech Explorist. “This discovery fills that gap.” he said.
The black hole is hidden inside B023-G078, a large star cluster in our closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. The cluster has long been considered a globular star cluster, and the researchers think that B023-G078 is not a stripped core. The stripped core is the remnants of a small galaxy that fell into a larger galaxy and its outer star was stripped away by the force of gravity. What remains is a small, dense core orbiting the larger galaxy and at the center of that core is a black hole.
Ivan der; HST ACS / HRC
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The left panel shows an image of the Milky Way’s closest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31) with a red box and insert showing the location and image of B023-G78 where the black hole was found.
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“Previously, we’ve found large black holes within massive flaky cores that are much larger than B023-G078. We knew that there must be smaller black holes in lower-mass cores, but there was never any direct evidence,” the authors said. principal, Renuka Pechetti of Liverpool John Moores University, who started the research while at the University of Utah. “I think it’s a pretty clear case that we’ve finally found one of these objects.” he added.
The results of this study were published on January 11, 2022 in The Astrophysical Journal which includes the title Detection of a 100,000 M ⊙ black hole in M31’s Most Massive Globular Cluster: A Tidally Stripped Nucleus.
B023-G078 is known as a massive globular star cluster, which is a collection of spherical stars that are tightly bound by gravity. However, there is only one observation of the object that determines its overall mass, about 6.2 million solar masses. Over the years, Seth had felt it was something else.
“I know that object B023-G078 is one of the most massive objects in Andromeda and thought it could be a candidate for a stripped core. But we need data to prove it. We’ve applied it to various telescopes to get more observations over the years. and my proposals always fail,” said Seth. “When we discovered a supermassive black hole in a stripped core in 2014, the Gemini Observatory gave us the opportunity to explore the idea,” he said.
With their new observational data from the Gemini Observatory and images from the Hubble, Pechetti Space Telescope, Seth and their team calculated how mass is distributed within the object by modeling its light profile. The spherical cluster has a distinctive light profile that has the same shape near the center as it does in the outer region. B023-G078 is different. The light in the center is round and then becomes flatter as it moves outward. The chemical makeup of the stars also changes, with more heavy elements in the stars at the center than near the edges of objects.
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