Black holes pack a seemingly impossible amount of matter into a near-infinitely small space. This equips black holes with such unimaginably powerful gravitational fields nothing – even light – can escape. And as if black holes were not already incredible enough, the latest black hole encounter has stunned space scientists, who have spotted a rare, Jupiter-size black hole violently devouring our Milky Way.
Scientists are unable to observe black holes directly with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation.
I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking
Dr Shunya Takekawa
They can, however, infer the presence of black holes and study them by detecting their effect on other matter nearby.
New research tracking a celestial cloud structure witnessed bizarre behaviour that may have been caused by just such an invisible object.
That data came courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), a set of 66 telescopes scattered across northern Chile’s Atacama Desert.
Lead author Shunya Takekawa, an astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said: “When I checked the ALMA data for the first time, I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking.”
Dr Takekawa and his colleagues were using ALMA to study two gas clouds, which the team nicknamed Balloon and Stream for their shapes, in May 2018.
During that time, they watched the gas moving strangely, appearing to spin around an unknown body.
That movement allowed the team to calculate that 30,000 times the mass of our sun was packed into an object the size of Jupiter at the centre of the swirl.
These features, combined with the lack of light coming from the location, suggest that the culprit is medium-sized black hole.
Scientists think tiny black holes and supermassive black holes are pretty common, but medium-sized black holes are far rarer.
Astronomers believe they have spotted two other black holes in this size range near the heart of the Milky Way.
All three, if future observations continue to see evidence for them, may be escapees from the giant black hole sitting at our galaxy’s centre.
Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion.
Smaller stars become dense neutron stars, which are not massive enough to trap light.
If the total mass of the star is large enough – approximately three times the Sun’s mass, it can be proven theoretically that no force can keep the star from collapsing under the influence of gravity.
And as the star collapses, the surface of the star nears an imaginary surface called the “event horizon,” time on the star slows relative to the time kept by observers far away.
When the surface reaches the event horizon, time stands still, and the star can collapse no more – it is a frozen collapsing object.
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