A New Kind of Giant Black Hole Was Just Found Lurking Near The Heart of Our Galaxy
A giant black hole some 100,000 times the mass of the Sun has been detected near the heart of the Milky Way, making it our galaxy’s second largest known black hole – coming after the supermassive void at its very centre, Sagittarius A*.
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I thought an intermediate black hole had already been found?
Sizes
Super massive black holes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole
A supermassive black hole (SMBH) is the largest type of black hole, on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses (M☉), and is found in the centre of almost all currently known massive galaxies. In the case of the Milky Way, the SMBH corresponds with the location of Sagittarius A*.
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Intermediate-mass black hole
Intermediate-mass black hole
An intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) is a hypothetical class of black hole with mass in the range 100 to one million solar masses: significantly more than stellar black holes but less than supermassive black holes. There is as yet no unambiguous detection of an IMBH, but the indirect evidence from various directions is promising.
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Stellar black hole
Stellar black hole
A stellar black hole (or stellar-mass black hole) is a black hole formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star. They have masses ranging from about 5 to several tens of solar masses. The process is observed as a hypernova explosion or as a gamma ray burst. These black holes are also referred to as collapsars.
Well if there is a Super Massive Black Hole at the centre of galaxies, then their must be hundreds of billions of them. If their smaller intermediate relative abounds then it must be in the order of trillions.
Tau.Neutrino said:
A New Kind of Giant Black Hole Was Just Found Lurking Near The Heart of Our GalaxyA giant black hole some 100,000 times the mass of the Sun has been detected near the heart of the Milky Way, making it our galaxy’s second largest known black hole – coming after the supermassive void at its very centre, Sagittarius A*.
more…
Is this the same gas cloud that was expected to be torn apart recently when it came within cooee of Sagittarius A* ?
The one that unexpectedly stayed compact. The one called G2 (or its brother, G1).
(Notice my pun, calling CO-0.40-0.22 “COOEE”?)
No, there are plenty of other gas clouds around, called “Sgr D HII, Sgr D SNR, SNR 0.9+0.1, Sgr B1, Sgr B2, SNR 0.3+0.0, Sgr A, SNR 359.1-00.5, SNR 359.0-00.9, Sgr C, Sgr E, Mouse, Snake, and Cane”. Looking at Figure 2 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.05332.pdf a compact unnamed gas cloud exists at galactic longitude, latitude (-0.40, -0.22).
ArXiv paper from Dec 2015 at https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04661
It’s still unconfirmed by other researchers but looks promising.