It is the closest outside the Milky Way. It is in the great cloud of Magallanes, our galactic neighbor. The nearby supermassive hole was recently confirmed. The researchers tracked the trajectories with an ultrafine precision of 21 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way. These stars travel so fast that they will escape the gravitational claws of the Milky Way. They call them “hyperveloces.”
Around the corner
It is like recreating the origin of a bullet based on its trajectory. Thus they determined where these hyperveloces stars come from. They discovered that approximately half are linked to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. However, the other half originated elsewhere. It is a previously unknown giant black hole in the great cloud of Magallanes (LMC).
“The nearby supermassive hole is just around the corner, cosmically speaking.” Jesse Han said it in a statement, from the Harvard Astrophysics Center. “It was under our noses all this time.” Data from the GAIA mission of the European Space Agency were used. The satellite has tracked more than one billion stars throughout the Milky Way with unprecedented precision. «We knew that these hyperveloces stars existed. Gaia allows us to find out where they really come from, ”they indicate.
Hyperveloce stars are created when a double star system approaches a supermassive black hole. The intense gravitational attraction of the black hole separates the two stars. Capture a star in a nearby orbit around him. The orphan star is expelled at speeds greater than several million miles per hour. Thus a hyperveloz star is born.
Other objects
“The only explanation we can give to this data is the existence of a monstrous black hole in our neighboring galaxy,” they clarify. “In our cosmic neighborhood it is not just the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way that expels stars of its galaxy.”
The mass of the nearby supermassive hole was determined. It is approximately 600,000 times the mass of the sun. By way of comparison, the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way has approximately 4 million solar masses. In other parts of the universe there are supermassive black holes with billions of times more mass than the Sun. The article appeared in The Astrophysical Journal. A preliminary version appears on the ARXIV predimussion server.
Leave your reaction
