September 4, 2017
Astronomers Think They Discovered The Missing Link in Black Hole Evolution
Science fiction doesn’t exist to make movies about the stuff we know about—it explores the unknown physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry where real uncertainty about topics can lead to compelling, believable stories. That’s what makes black holes such a popular subject; light can’t escape them, maybe they’re portals across space and time, and they seem to break the rules. But who needs fiction when there are already incredibly strange mysteries in the real world?
Today, a team of Japanese researchers are reporting strong evidence for a kind of black hole, one that fills in the mysterious gap between black holes around the mass of a star and supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies. The fact that we haven’t seen any of these “intermediate-mass black holes” before is super weird.
“It’s like walking around the world and seeing only newborn infants and really old adults,” Grant Tremblay, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics not involved with the new study told Gizmodo. “[We’re] not seeing any adolescents or early or middle aged people.”
A few kinds of black holes definitely exist, or at least our observations have shown strong enough evidence that scientists feel comfortable concluding them to be black holes. Some are about the mass of a big star, like those observed by gravitational wave detectors. Then there are enormous ones like Sagittarius A*, the bright radio wave source four million times the mass of the Sun in the center of our galaxy. But without an observed intermediate-mass black hole, scientists don’t know how something like Sag A* got to be so big.
“Although many candidates for [intermediate-mass black holes] have been proposed, none is accepted as definitive,” the researchers write in a study published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. But now, they think they’ve found one.
“In the previous paper, we suggested that an intermediate-mass black hole may be lurking in the peculiar molecular cloud, CO-0.40-0.22, based on the observed gas kinematics,” study author Tomaharu Oka from Keio University in Japan told Gizmodo. “The detection of a point-like radio continuum source, CO-0.40-0.22*, near the center of CO-0.40-0.22 confirmed our previous suggestion.”