Harry is a U.K.-based senior staff writer at Live Science. He studied marine biology at the University of Exeter before training to become a journalist. He covers a wide range of topics including space exploration, planetary science, space weather, climate change, animal behavior, evolution and paleontology.
Astronomers may have found a rare"missing link" black hole in the Milky Way after spotting a group of improbably fast-moving stars at the heart of a nearby stellar cluster. If confirmed, the cosmic juggernaut, known as an intermediate-mass black hole , would be the second-largest black hole ever found in our galaxy.
Now, in a recent study uploaded April 4 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers may have uncovered evidence of a large IMBH in the globular cluster Omega Centauri — a compact group of around 10 million stars in the Milky Way located around 17,000 light-years from Earth. "The most likely explanation is that a very massive object is gravitationally pulling on these stars and keeping them close to the centre," study lead author Maximilian Häberle, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in the statement."The only object that can be so massive is a black hole, with a mass at least 8,200 times that of our sun.
The Milky Way's second-biggest black hole?Omega Centauri is an unusual entity: It is around 10 times larger than most other globular clusters and is surprisingly flat. It is so massive that you can even see it with the naked eye on dark, clear nights, when it takes up almost as much of the night sky as the moon when viewed from Earth.
But the superfast stars highlighted in the new study indicate the existence of an IMBH, the study authors argue.
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Missing Milky Way black holes are bad news for this dark matter theoryRobert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.
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