For the first time, a middleweight black hole has been discovered by a group of scientists. Holger Baumgardt from the University of Queensland, who has spent 40 years looking for just this type of black hole said the discovery is very significant as it is the missing link between the small and massive black holes. Through this discovery, astronomers can understand better how galaxies have formed.
Science Daily reports that all discovered black holes can be categorized into two groups: small black holes that could weigh twice or more of Earth's very own Sun, or the massive ones that could contain millions or even billions of Suns. The middleweight black that had been recently discovered weighs about 2,200 Suns.
The lead author of the research, Bulen Kiziltan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had this to say about why their team did a research on this type of black hole, "We want to find intermediate-mass black holes because they are the missing link between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. They may be the primordial seeds that grew into the monsters we see in the centers of galaxies today."
The newly-discovered back hole was seen hiding at the star cluster 47 Tucanae, which is 13,000 light years from our planet. The 12-billion-year-old 47 Tucanae, which hold thousands of stars, was already examined for a black hole before, although none was found. This is because there is no gas in 47 Tucanae, and black holes are only detected by x-rays when it is feeding on nearby gas.
What the team did was to look at the computer simulations done by scientists from Queensland. The simulations on stellar motions and distances were compared to visible-light observations. ABC Australia cites Dr. Baumgardt's explanation that a middleweight black hole acts as a spoon that stirs the pot, and it is this gravitational stirring that the scientists found as evidence, although he is quick to say that this was a significant discovery, it is by no means evidence of life in the universe.
