Astronomers think they have detected an extremely rare type of “missing link” black hole chowing down on a helpless star at the edge of a distant galaxy — and they’ve shared a stunning animation showing what this superbright stellar massacre may have looked like.
Black holes come in a range of sizes, from primordial singularities smaller than the sun to supermassive black holes that are up to 40 billion times more massive than our home star and hold together galaxies such as the Milky Way. There are also medium-size versions, known as intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), which range from 100 to 100,000 solar masses. We know little about these medium-size objects, however, as they are incredibly hard to find.
IMBHs are elusive because they are not big enough to produce energy jets or bind galaxies together, and they are often confused with clusters of smaller “stellar mass” black holes left over from collapsed stars. Researchers also think IMBHs may hide behind small groups of stars that closely orbit them without being ripped apart.
The most reliable way to spot IMBHs is indirectly, by measuring the masses of merging black holes or by catching them in the act of consuming a star. To date, around 300 IMBH candidates have been spotted, but there is no way of knowing how many of these are real.
In a study published April 11 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers reported that they’d spotted another promising IMBH candidate, dubbed HLX-1, which is located around 40,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy NGC 6099 and more than 450 million light-years from Earth.
Related: Watch a star get destroyed by a supermassive black hole in the 1st simulation of its kind
By combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the study team believes they have spotted a bright flash, or “tidal disruption event,” caused by the black hole devouring a neighboring star. The researchers also used computer simulations to predict how this cosmic murder played out and produced an animation showing HLX-1 ripping apart — or “spaghettifying” — its stellar victim (see below).
Astronomers first saw a bright source of…
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