Astronomers believe they have detected a very rare type of “missing link” black hole traversing through helpless stars at the edge of a distant galaxy. And they shared a stunning animation showing what this Super Bright star massacre would look like.
Black holes come in a variety of sizes, ranging from primitive singularities smaller than the sun to large black holes up to 40 billion times larger than the homestar. There is also a medium-sized version known as the intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) in the solar mass range of 100-100,000. However, I know very little about these medium-sized objects.
IMBH is elusive because it is not large enough to produce energy jets or combine galaxies, and is often confused with clusters of small “stellar mass” black holes that remain from fallen stars. Researchers also believe that IMBHS could hide behind a small group of stars that orbit them closely without being torn apart.
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The most reliable way to find IMBHS is indirectly to measure the mass of fusion of black holes or catch them with the act of consuming stars. To date, around 300 IMBH candidates have been discovered, but there is no way to know which of these actually exist.
In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal on April 11, the researchers reported that they discovered another promising IMBH candidate called HLX-1, which is about 40,000 light years from the heart of the Galaxy NGC 6099 and over 450 million light years from Earth.
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By combining Hubble Space Telescope with data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the research team believes they have discovered a bright flash, or “tide dirpraption event,” caused by a black hole that eats up the next star. Researchers also used computer simulations to produce animations that show how this universe murder unfolded and the HLX-1 was torn apart, or “spaghetto” – the victim of that star (see below).
Astronomers first saw a bright source of X-rays from the HLX-1 in an image taken by Chandra in 2009. Researchers believe this bright light is a tide-disturbing event. High-energy light from the suspicious black holes peaked in 2012 and has been gradually darkening ever since.
However, like many other IMBH candidates, we are not 100% sure that the HLX-1 is a real IMBH. Light can also be caused by accretion disks, which are swirling rings of super hot matter surrounding the event horizon of black holes, varying in size. The only way to tell which explanation is more likely is to monitor the light source. Continuing dimming without any additional flare-ups probably generated a tide disruption event.
In addition to being rare, IMBH is important because it can tell us about other black holes. They said they are studying author Yi-chi Chang, a researcher at the National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan, “representing an important missing link in the evolution of black holes between stellar mass and ultra-large black holes.”
One theory about IMBHS is that they can start as black holes of large star masses and eventually grow into super-large black holes for billions of years. For this to happen, they might spend most of their lives in the outskirts of galaxies like HLX-1 before they are shattered into intergalactic space. Some researchers even suspect that similar IMBHs could circumnavigate the Milky Way fringe.
To support this theory, astronomers are currently looking for more potential tidal disruption events at the edges of other galaxies.
Recent technological advances, including James Webb Space Telescope, show promise in detecting these missing links. The research team also noted that the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which recently released its first spectacular image, could potentially detect visible tide dirpering events of light.
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