Intermediate black holes are almost certain to exist, but they're tough to spot. The Hubble might have helped find another one.
,” and the lead author is Eduardo Vitral of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
One star stood out in the data. It’s a high-velocity star that the authors think was sped up by interactions with an IMBH in M4’s center. “If the high-µ star is associated with a putative IMBH, its high velocity could be eventually explained by a dynamical kick after close passage to the compact object,” they write. They also point out that modelling shows that an IMBH in M4’s center gives a 33% chance of finding a high-velocity star in the cluster’s central region.
But the researchers were able to effectively remove the high-velocity star from their simulations to see what effect it had on the nature of the central mass. “However, when removing a high-velocity star from the cluster centre, the same mass excess is found, but more extended,” they explain. “Using the latest Gaia and Hubble data, it was not possible to distinguish between a dark population of stellar remnants and a single larger point-like source,” lead author Vitral said in a press release. “So one of the possible theories is that rather than being lots of separate small dark objects, this dark mass could be one medium-sized black hole.”
In a press release, lead author Vitral explains the team’s results in broad, clear terms. “We measure the motions of stars and their positions, and we apply physical models that try to reproduce these motions. We end up with a measurement of a dark mass extension in the cluster’s centre,” said Vitral. “The closer to the central mass, the more randomly the stars are moving. And, the greater the central mass, the faster these stellar velocities.
This image from the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory shows the spectacular globular star cluster Messier 4. It’s about 7200 light-years away, about 75 light-years across, and like other globular clusters, it’s ancient: about 12.2 billion years old. Image Credit: By ESO Imaging Survey – https://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/eso1235a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.
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