Stunning find: ‘Missing link’ in black hole evolution discovered

Stunning find: ‘Missing link’ in black hole evolution discovered

Scientists believe that intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) lead to the creation of the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, but such bodies have been highly elusive.

Scientists have found a celestial body that could be the long-sought missing link in black hole evolution.

The object, a moderately sized black hole called NGC-2276-3c, sits on the arm of the spiral galaxy NGC-2276 100 million light years from Earth. The black hole has an estimate mass of between a few hundred to a few hundred thousand suns, compared to the giant black holes that are at the heart of galaxies and are the size of billions of suns, according to a Space.com report.

Called an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH), such bodies are believed to be the seeds that spawn supermassive black holes, but finding such moderately sized objects have been difficult.

Tim Roberts, co-author of th study that examined the issue from the University of Durham in the UK, said in a statement that astronomers have been “looking very hard for these medium-sized black holes,” according to the report.

While scientists have seen hints that IMBHs exist, they have been elusive to say the least. However, Roberts and his colleagues from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts studied the X-ray light from NGC-2276-3c using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and examined radio light with the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network. Using these observations, the team was able to estimate that the mass of the black hole was about 50,000 suns, placing it in the IMBH category.

It has traits similar to both supermassive and stellar-mass black holes, making this body an object that “helps tie the whole black hole family together,” said Andrei Lobanov, a co-author of the study from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

Researchers also noted that a powerful radio jet blasting 2,000 light-years into space from the black hole has cleared a path among young stars for about 1,000 light-years, which indicates that it cleared out clouds of gas and prevented them from forming into stars.

The team conducted a separate study to look into NGC 2276-3c’s origin, using Chandra to find that about five to 15 suns are forming each year in the galaxy, a high rate that indicates the galaxy collided with another smaller galaxy, which can cause stars to form rapidly. This means that NGC 2276-3c may have been located near the core of the dwarf galaxy.

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