New Discovery Key to Supermassive Black Holes

A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers 290 million light years from Earth providing a key clue to the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of all known galaxies in the universe.

Until now, identified black holes have been either super-massive (several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun) in the centre of galaxies, or about the size of a typical star (between three and 20 Solar masses).

The new discovery is the first solid evidence of a new class of medium-sized black holes. The team, led by astrophysicists at the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France, detected the new black hole with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.

"While it is widely accepted that stellar mass black holes are created during the death throes of massive stars, it is still unknown how super-massive black holes are formed," says the lead author of the paper, Dr Sean Farrell, now based at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. "One theory is that super-massive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate mass black holes. To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes.

"This is the best detection to date of such long sought after intermediate mass black holes. Such a detection is essential. While it is already known that stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars, the formation mechanisms of supermassive black holes are still unknown."

"The identification of HLX-1 is therefore an important step towards a better understanding of the formation of the super-massive black holes that exist at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies."

This new source, dubbed HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49. It is ultra-luminous in X-rays, with a maximum X-ray brightness of approximately 260 million times that of the Sun. Its position indicates that it is not the central engine of the host galaxy.

Posted by Casey Kazan

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Source: University of Leicester

Comments

[bitirim]

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[Barrie O'Leary]

For the past 37 years I have simply considered that black holes per se just crunched themselves down to a singularity. I imagine the process involves the transformation of particulate energy into energy waves. This has weight but no volume. The singularity concepts serves to illustrate a concept even if not factual. Our picture of an atom with orbiting electrons may not be precise, either, but it makes the structural concept rationalised.

So, the concept of colliding black holes invokes an entirely new
outlook to interacting energies. On the probability one would be larger. But if the smaller had greater spin (a la white dwarfs) it must be seen as compatible to swallowing the larger. The physics of such a reaction elude me but visible light cannot be involved.

[Velocity Wave]

In this phrase of the article there is a grammatical error:
"new class of black hole... has been discovered by an international team of astronomers 290 million light years from Earth"

According to the grammatical structure and modifier, that sentence means that the astronomer team is currently located 290 million light years from Earth! It would be unlikely for humans to have traveled that far.

I think it should have been phrased as:

"new class of black hole, 290 million light years from Earth... has been discovered by an international team of astronomers."