A comma-shaped molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way appears to be orbiting one of the most sought-after objects in astronomy.
At the center of Tadpole’s orbit (the frog’s name is given to the new discovery), a team of astronomers saw the most exciting and mysterious object in astronomy, the black hole.
The missing link in solving the mystery of black holes
Modeling indicates that this would not be just an ordinary black hole, but rather a class of mediums rarely seen, according to the research published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Scientists consider medium-mass black holes the missing link in the chain of studying this mysterious astronomical phenomenon.
If this is the case, it would be the candidate for the fifth intermediate black hole, located near the center of the galaxy.
And this growing number of elusive objects could help astronomers figure out how supermassive black holes form in the centers of galaxies, and how they grow to such enormous size.
In this paper, we report the discovery of a strange, isolated compact cloud.
The tadpole’s spatial compression, and the absence of bright isotopes at other wavelengths, suggests that the object could be an intermediate-mass black hole.
cosmic puzzle
Black holes in the universe tend to exist in two distinct collective systems. There are black holes with stellar mass, up to about 100 times the mass of the sun.
These are black holes that form from the core collapse of a massive star at the end of its life, or the merger of such black holes.
Then there are the supermassive black holes, the giants found at the centers of galaxies, with masses millions to billions of times that of the sun.
It is not clear how these objects form, and it is a cosmic mystery that astronomers would like to solve.
Answers can be found in one place, among intermediate mass black holes.
The finding of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) may be evidence that black holes span evenly over a full range of masses, and that intermediate holes are a growth stage between a hole and a giant.
But very few of these medium-weight objects have been identified, and for the most part they are only provisionally identified.
One problem is that single black holes don’t emit any light on their own, and can only be detected by the effect their immense gravity has on their environment.
The tadpole…the average black hole
This imprecise drag can affect the orbital dance of distant objects, such as stars that astronomers have studied to investigate the presence of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
And the galactic center is a place very crowded with molecular clouds, the kind that generate stars. It is known as the central molecular region, and its molecular gas density is many times higher than the disk of the Milky Way.
Because the area is so dense, it can be hard to see inside, but a powerful radio telescope can detect activity in it.
And that’s how the researchers found the cloud they’ve dubbed the Tadpole, using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope to search for the gas that caused the gravitational disturbance.
The tadpole, a molecular cloud very close to the galactic center, 27,000 light-years away, was moving differently from other nearby matter.
The team found that its elongated shape was likely the result of being pulled by the strong tidal force of gravitational interaction.
Their models showed that the mass responsible for this reaction is about 100,000 times that of the Sun.
Questions that need to be answered?
where are you from? How did black holes form? Questions will still need to be answered.
First, the team needs to confirm their suspicions, and they plan to use the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to conduct follow-up observations of the tadpole, to determine if they can find signs of a black hole, or something else, in the orbital centre.
And if it turns out to be an intermediate-mass black hole, that could have profound implications for our understanding of the colossal diversity of the universe.