First intermediate-Mass Black Hole discovered by researchers

Through the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers have been able to discover a black hole that is surrounded by a cluster of young blue stars.

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers found a cluster of young stars that are encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole that was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy.

“For the first time, we have evidence on the environment, and thus the origin, of this middle-weight black hole,” said Mathieu Servillat, who worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics when this research was conducted.

Astronomers know how massive stars collapse to form stellar-mass black holes (which weigh about 10 times the mass of our sun), but it’s not clear how supermassive black holes (like the four million solar-mass monster at the center of the Milky Way) form
in the cores of galaxies. One idea is that supermassive black holes may build up through the merger of smaller, intermediate-mass black holes weighing hundreds to thousands of suns.

Lead author Sean Farrell, of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia, discovered this unusual black hole in 2009 using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope. Known as HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), the black hole weighs
in at 20,000 solar masses and lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49, which is 290 million light-years from Earth.

Farrell and his team then observed HLX-1 simultaneously with NASA’s Swift observatory in X-ray and Hubble in near-infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths. The intensity and the color of the light shows a cluster of young stars, 250 light-years across,
encircling the black hole. Hubble can’t resolve the stars individually because the suspected cluster is too far away. The brightness and color are consistent with other clusters of young stars seen in other galaxies.

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Posted by Taimoor Tariq on Feb 17 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry