The Hubble Space Telescope of the POT has detected the possible presence of a “rare” intermediate-sized black hole near Earth. This black hole is located in the globular star cluster Messier 4 (M4), at a distance of 6,000 light years.
As it explains Aristegui News, black holes are classified into two sizes: huge and small. The former have masses millions or billions of times that of the Sun and are found in the nuclei of galaxies. The second ones are much smaller, with masses that are only a few times that of the Sun, and they are formed from the explosion of stars.
Intermediate-sized black holes, on the other hand, have masses ranging from 100 to 100,000 times the solar mass. These are less common in space and a few potential examples have been identified in the past. These intermediate black holes are thought to have been at the center of dwarf galaxies, although existing data is inconclusive and alternative theories are being explored.
What hides the discovered black hole?
The black hole detected by Hubble is not directly visible, but scientists were able to calculate its mass by observing the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field over a period of 12 years. Furthermore, the telescope data seems to rule out alternative theories to explain this object.
Eduardo Vitral of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, lead author of the study, explained: “The region is more compact than we can reproduce with numerical simulations when we consider a collection of black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs at the center of the cluster. They cannot form such a compact mass concentration”.
Alternative theories suggest that it could actually be a compact central cluster of unresolved stellar remnants, such as neutron stars, or smaller interacting black holes. However, such a close grouping of objects would be dynamically unstable.
To explain the observed stellar motions would require roughly 40 smaller black holes crammed into a space of just one-tenth of a light-year, causing mergers or ejections in an “interstellar pinball game.”