A 'Middleweight' Black Hole Hiding At The Center Of the Globular Star Discovered For The First Time

Astronomers identified for the first time an intermediate-mass black hole also called "middleweight" black hole hiding at the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae. It weighs about 2,200 times the mass of the Sun.

The world's first discovery was described in the science journal Nature on Feb. 9, 2017. It was led by Dr. Bulent Kiziltan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States and other colleagues. This discovery is the first proof that the intermediate-mass black hole exists in space, according to ABC News.

A Middleweight Black Hole is Hiding at the Center of a Giant Star Cluster https://t.co/imqJcHl2p0 pic.twitter.com/V4PBIr72Aw

— pugmum (@pugmum1) February 8, 2017

Dr. Kiziltan said that they want to find intermediate-mass black holes because they are the missing link between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. He further said that they may be primordial seeds that grew into the monsters they see in the centers of galaxies today.

There are two pieces of evidence of the existence of this middleweight black hole. First is the overall motions of stars in the cluster, in which it so dense that the heavier stars tend to sink at the center of the cluster. Meanwhile, the intermediate-mass black hole hiding at the center of the cluster acts like a cosmic spoon and stirs the pot. This caused the stars to slingshot to higher speeds and greater distances. Then, the team was able to employ computer simulations of stellar motions and distances and likened them with visible-light observations and finally finds evidence for this gravitational stirring.

The second evidence comes from pulsars and dead stars that radio signals could be easily identified. They were also flung by the gravity of the central intermediate-mass black hole and caused them to be at greater distances from the center of the cluster.

With these two pieces of evidence, the astronomers discovered the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole of about 2,200 solar masses in the 47 Tucanae. This is 12-billion-year-old star cluster located 13,000 lightyears away from Earth in the southern constellation of Tucana the Toucan, according to Phys.org.