CfA: Middleweight Black Hole Hiding in Giant Star Cluster

[bystander]

A Middleweight Black Hole Is Hiding at the Center of a Giant Star Cluster
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 2017 Feb 08

This artist's conception shows a representation of the intermediate-mass black hole that may lurk in the center of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. (Credit: B. Kızıltan & T. Karacan)

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All known black holes fall into two categories: small, stellar-mass black holes weighing a few Suns, and supermassive black holes weighing millions or billions of Suns. Astronomers expect that intermediate-mass black holes weighing 100 to 10,000 Suns also exist, but so far no conclusive proof of such middleweights has been found. Today, astronomers are announcing new evidence that an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) weighing 2,200 Suns is hiding at the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae.

"We want to find intermediate-mass black holes because they are the missing link between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. They may be the primordial seeds that grew into the monsters we see in the centers of galaxies today," says lead author Bulent Kiziltan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). ...

47 Tucanae is a 12-billion-year-old star cluster located 13,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Tucana the Toucan. It contains hundreds of thousands of stars in a ball only about 120 light-years in diameter. It also holds about two dozen pulsars that were important targets of this investigation.

47 Tucanae has been examined for a central black hole before without success. In most cases, a black hole is found by looking for X-rays coming from a hot disk of material swirling around it. This method only works if the black hole is actively feeding on nearby gas. The center of 47 Tucanae is gas-free, effectively starving any black hole that might lurk there.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way also betrays its presence by its influence on nearby stars. Years of infrared observations have shown a handful of stars at our galactic center whipping around an invisible object with a strong gravitational tug. But the crowded center of 47 Tucanae makes it impossible to watch the motions of individual stars. ...

An intermediate-mass black hole in the centre of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae - Bülent Kızıltan, Holger Baumgardt, Abraham Loeb

• Nature 542(7640):203 (09 Feb 2017) DOI: 10.1038/nature21361
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1702.02149 > 07 Feb 2017