Science
600,000‑Solar‑Mass Black Hole Discovered In Neighboring Galaxy, Headed Toward Milky Way
An intergalactic danger will destroy our third rock from the Sun and negate all of the concerns we already have about climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence, and nations destroying one another. What about supermassive black holes? We’re not just talking about ‘God of Chaos’ asteroids or little green guys assaulting us.
According to the New Scientist, nine stars that are presently circling our galaxy may be caused by a supermassive black hole that is hidden in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). According to Jiwon Jesse Han of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, the black hole within the LMC may be 600,000 times more massive than the Sun.
One near the Milky Way’s centre, on the other hand, is around four million times as massive as the Sun.
It’s just a matter of time until Earth faces the threat of being engulfed by this celestial monster, as the LMC is on an ever-closing loop that will eventually crash with our galaxy (fortunately, we’ll all be long gone by then).
By examining so-called hypervelocity stars—stars that travel at speeds greater than 500 kilometres per second—Han and his colleagues were able to determine the existence of the supermassive black hole. “It’s really impossible to explain those high speeds with supernova ejections,” said Emily Hunt of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. Supernova ejections are accelerated by gravitational slingshots around a supermassive black hole.
Peer-reviewed study is still pending, however it is believed that the supermassive black hole in the LMC may be responsible for almost half of the hypervelocity stars in the Milky Way. It has been possible to trace nine hypervelocity stars to the Leo Overdensity, a region in the northern sky.
Han, who supported the study, said, “We can rewind the paths of these stars to see where they come from, and they track directly back to the LMC.”
Despite previous speculation that black holes are hiding out in dwarf galaxies, it’s so far been ‘impossible’ to prove. While Han says, “They’re too far away to image,” the LMC’s relative closeness of some 163,000 light-years away means we might be able to see stars orbiting it. “I think I know where to point, but I’m not going to give away the coordinates just yet.”
With a mass less than a million times that of the Sun, this supermassive black hole is incredibly unusual, however more research is required. It is believed that proving it will help scientists better grasp how black holes evolve from star-sized masses to monstrous entities that may devour entire star systems.
Han concluded, “One of the outstanding questions in astronomy is how did supermassive black holes begin. The dwarf galaxy supermassive black hole population is a good tracer of the initial seed mechanisms. And this would be the first [direct] detection of a supermassive black hole in a dwarf galaxy.”
Even a strong black hole observatory like the Event Horizon Telescope may not be able to capture this oddity in action, Han believes, even if work is still ongoing.
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