(ORDO NEWS) — A comma-shaped molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way appears to be orbiting one of the most popular objects in astronomy.
At the center of the Tadpole’s orbit, the team of astronomers saw exactly…nothing. And nothing that attracts something just screams “black hole”.
Modeling suggests that it will not be just an ordinary black hole, but one of a rare class of average weights; The “missing link” of intermediate-mass black holes.
If so, this would be the fifth intermediate black hole candidate found near the galactic center.
This growing number of previously elusive objects could help astronomers understand how supermassive black holes form at the centers of galaxies and then grow to such colossal sizes.
“In this paper, we report the discovery of an isolated peculiar compact cloud,” writes a team of astronomers led by Miyuki Kaneko of Keio University in Japan.
“The spatial compactness of the Tadpole and the absence of bright analogs at other wavelengths indicate that the object may be an intermediate mass. black hole.”
Black holes in the universe tend to be in two different mass regimes. There are black holes of stellar mass, about 100 times the mass of the Sun.
These are black holes that are formed as a result of the collapse of the core of a massive star at the end of its life or the merger of such black holes.
There are also supermassive black holes. These are giant chokers located in the centers of galaxies, the mass of which is millions and billions of times greater than the mass of the Sun.
It’s unclear how these objects form, and astronomers would like to solve this cosmic mystery. .
The answers can be found among black holes with intermediate masses.
Finding these Intermediate Mass Black Holes (IMBHs) would be proof that black holes span the entire mass range evenly, and that the intermediate ones are the growth stage between tick and behemoth.
But only a meager few of these medium-weight objects have been identified, and for the most part only tentatively.
One problem is that lonely black holes don’t emit light on their own.
They can only be detected by the effect that their enormous gravity has on the environment, causing matter to whirl in hot fury, or by the characteristic motions of the fabric of space-time.
This is wrong. The subtle jolt could affect the orbital dance of distant objects, such as stars, which astronomers have been studying to confirm the presence of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The galactic center is a pretty crowded place, actually. It is thick with molecular clouds, the kind that give birth to stars.
It is known as the Central Molecular Zone, and the density of its molecular gas is several orders of magnitude higher than that of the disk of the Milky Way.
Because this region is so dense, it can be hard to see what’s inside, but a powerful radio telescope can detect activity in it.
So the researchers discovered the cloud, which they called the Tadpole. They used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope to find the gas perturbed by gravity.
It was a tadpole: a molecular cloud very close to the galactic center, 27,000 light-years away, moving differently from other material nearby.
The team found that its elongated shape was likely the result of a strong tidal force – the gravitational interaction.
And their simulations showed that the mass responsible for this interaction is about 100,000 times the mass of the Sun. This is suggestive of an intermediate black hole.
Where it could have come from and how it was formed are questions that have yet to be answered.
First, the team needs to confirm their suspicions.
They intend to use the powerful Atacama millimeter/submillimeter array in Chile to conduct follow-up observations of the tadpole to determine if they can find signs of a black hole or something else in the center of the orbit.
If it turns out to be an intermediate-mass black hole, it could have major implications for our understanding of the supermassive variety.
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