New Discovery of Medium-Mass Black Hole in the Milky Way

TapTechNews July 20th news, Dr. Florian Peißker from the University of Cologne published a paper, discovered the IRS13 star cluster at a distance of 0.1 light-year from the center of the Milky Way and found evidence of a medium-mass black hole in it.

TapTechNews note: Among the black holes currently known to humans, there are mainly stellar-mass black holes (with a mass equivalent to 10-100 solar masses) and supermassive black holes (with a mass equivalent to more than 100,000 solar masses), but medium-mass black holes (with a mass equivalent to 100-100,000 solar masses) are relatively rare, and currently there are about 10 medium-mass black holes that have been clearly identified by humans.

According to the scientific consensus, the abnormal phenomena of medium-mass black holes are likely to have formed shortly after the Big Bang and play a crucial seed role in the formation and growth of supermassive black holes.

Dr. Peißker and his team conducted in-depth research on the star cluster named IRS13, which is very close to the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) at the center of the Milky Way, only 0.1 light-year away.

0.1 light-year is a very short distance in astronomy, but on Earth, it is equivalent to traveling back and forth between one end and the other end of the solar system 20 times.

The stars in IRS13 are moving in an unexpectedly orderly manner. Different from the expected random arrangement of stars, this precise pattern suggests two possible scenarios:

IRS13 may interact with SgrA*, resulting in the ordered movement of stars.

There may be something inside IRS13 that helps maintain the observed compact shape, which should be a medium-mass black hole.

The team came to a conclusion after conducting multi-wavelength observations using the Chandra telescope, the ALMA telescope, and the Very Large Telescope. The compact shape of IRS13 may be due to the existence of a medium-mass black hole at the center of the star cluster.

In support of this theory, they also observed characteristic X-rays and ionized gases rotating in the annular area around the location of the medium-mass black hole at a speed of several hundred kilometers per second.

The density of the star cluster is also unusually high, higher than the density of any known star cluster in the Milky Way. Dr. Peißker said, IRS13 seems to be an important cornerstone for the growth of our central black hole SgrA*.