The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a surprising image of a distant cluster of stars that would help us higher understand how such collections evolve and potentially even reveal the elusive black holes at their hearts.
Globular clusters just like the one on this Hubble Space Telescope image, often called NGC 6325, can contain between tens of 1000’s to hundreds of thousands of stars and are found across every kind of galaxies. The Milky Way itself is home to around 180 known globular clusters.
Because all the celebs in a globular cluster are believed to have formed at the identical time from the identical collapsing cloud of gas and mud, studying them can teach astrophysicists a terrific deal about how stars form and evolve. But astronomers are in search of something else in NGC 6325 rather more elusive than its densely packed stars: A compact cosmic titan called an intermediate-mass black hole. The seek for specimens of this class is a very important one, as astronomers still don’t quite understand how they’re are born.
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Astronomers are not any strangers to the universe’s largest black holes, having been in a position to detect a wealth of stellar mass black holes with masses of between around three and 10 times that of the sun. These stellar mass black holes form when the core of a single star collapses under its own gravity at the tip of its hydrogen-burning lifetime.
Scientists have even been in a position to capture direct images of supermassive black holes with masses as great as billions of times that of the sun which dwell at the guts of most large galaxies. These supermassive black holes are believed to be born when black holes collide and merge with other black holes, with these mergers increasing in size.
Even with all of those discoveries, intermediate-mass black holes have proved elusive. These medium-sized black holes have masses between 100 and 10,000 times that of the sun.
No single star could be massive enough to collapse and birth an intermediate-mass black hole. Intermediate-mass black holes, as an alternative, are thought to also grow by gathering mass, but this will likely be resulting from stellar mass black holes greedily feeding on the fabric surrounding them, like gas, dust and even stars that enterprise too near them.
Investigations of NGC 6325 and other globular clusters have revealed that the distribution of stars throughout them differs from what astronomers would expect. Because intermediate black holes would have an amazing gravitational influence that might affect the motion of stars around them, studying these clusters intimately could hint at their presence.
If an intermediate black hole does indeed lurk inside NGC 6325 on the globular cluster’s heart, then images just like the one Hubble produced could finally reveal them, granting astronomers a greater idea of how globular clusters and these medium-sized monsters grow.
