About 7,800 light-years away — within our galactic neighborhood — is the globular cluster NGC 6397, basically a cluster of stars joined by gravity. That group of stars was thought to have an intermediate-sized black hole in the center. But after a subsequent inspection, a team from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics has determined that the cluster actually houses a sheath of smaller black holes, which hold things together in a more diffuse system.
Previous research had suggested that the core of the cluster could be populated with a conglomeration of black holes the size of a star, but this paper goes a step further by also measuring the mass and extent of these objects. The team’s investigation was published this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
To identify the mystery at the center of the cluster, the researchers examined how stars near their center moved using data from two space telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia Observatory.
“We found very strong evidence of an invisible mass in the dense core of the globular cluster, but we were surprised to find that this additional mass is not ‘point-like,'” said Eduardo Vitral of the Institute of Astrophysics. Paris. NASA press release. If it were just a black hole, the mysterious mass would concentrate more densely. “Ours is the first study to provide both the mass and extent of what appears to be a collection of black holes mostly in the center of a collapsed globular cluster.”
Intermediate black holes have long been considered a lost nexus in the evolution of black holes. Perhaps less in public view than supermassive black holes (whose existence is proven) or primordial tiny black holes (which are still theoretical), intermediate black holes, as their name suggests, would help astronomers to understand how these enigmatic structures develop.
“Our analysis indicated that the orbits of stars are randomly close to the entire globular cluster, rather than being systematically circular or very elongated,” explained Gary Mamon, also of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. in the same version. If the orbits of the stars were coordinated, I would suggest a massive object ruling. Instead, the stars seemed inverted in their own ad-hoc movements. Mamon and Vitral believe that this is due to dense stellar debris such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes — formed when stars reach the end of their life and sink into themselves. sink to the center of the cluster, in a sort of three. Plinko dimensional. In contrast, lower-mass stars headed to the periphery of the cluster.
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“The authors have carried out an exhaustive analysis and the conclusions of this work present an unexpected development in the search for [intermediate black holes] in globular clusters, “Misty Bentz, an astrophysicist at Georgia State University who is not affiliated with the recent paper, said in an email.” However, there are many assumptions that are needed when conducting studies. like this, and the results still leave room for the possibility of a [intermediate black hole] in this globular cluster.
The artistic illustrations of the globular cluster, shown in the video above, look like someone pierced space-time with a shotgun on a stellar scale. Abysses of immense gravitational force emerge from the cluster; the remains of dead stars holding their living siblings together in a gravitational web (or sticking them, depending on your vision). It is no surprise that this region contains so many white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes; NGC 6397 is an extremely old cluster, incoming at 12.6 billion years, they give or take half a million, giving stars time to complete their life cycles.
Bentz said the new study doesn’t quite show that the cluster contains many small black holes instead of a larger one, “but if so, it makes the origin of supermassive black holes even more mysterious than it already is. they are! This is because, he explained, “we expect supermassive black holes to grow from smaller seeds.” But the result of this study would suggest that it is actually difficult to combine many small black holes in a globular cluster, because the globular cluster is old and yet the small black holes still hang individually, not combined.
It is an intriguing find. Although black holes were predicted to exist in 1916 by Albert Einstein, it was only two years ago, in April 2019, that scientists captured a real image of a. Clearly we have much more to know about these mysterious objects.