Hubble Just Found a New Type of Black Hole. It Will Rewrite Astronomy!

Astronomers have found evidence of a rare missing-link black hole in our cosmic neighborhood. It’s an intermediate-mass black hole located around 6000 light-years away in the Messier 4 star cluster. So far, we have only observed two distinct black hole classes: the gargantuan supermassive black holes, lurking in the centers of galaxies and weighing millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, and their smaller counterparts, the stellar mass black holes, born from the violent deaths of massive stars and weighing just a few times the Sun’s mass. However, a groundbreaking discovery in a nearby star cluster is challenging this dual classification and offering a tantalizing glimpse into a previously elusive category of black holes. Astronomers have unveiled evidence of a rare intermediate-mass black hole, filling the mass gap between the supermassive and stellar black holes. But what makes an intermediate-mass black hole or an IMBH so special? Why is it so difficult to find a black hole in this category? Finally, and most importantly, how did astronomers make this exciting discovery? The 71st episode of the Sunday Discovery Series answers these questions. RESEARCH PAPER: An elusive dark central mass in the globular cluster M4, E. Vitral et al. - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society - https://bit.ly/3E3L3GF Created By: Rishabh Nakra Written & Researched By: Simran Buttar Narrated By: Jeffrey Smith