Hubble Spots Nearly Impossible To Find Intermediate Mass Black Hole

Space.com

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory joined forces to find an elusive intermediate mass black holes in galaxy NGC 6099.   Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Paul Morris: Lead Producer  Music Credit: "Float On" by Layla Pavey [PRS] and Samuel John Chase [PRS] via Zone Music Ltd [PRS] and Universal Production Music

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00:00Just a few years after its launch in 1990, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope made a groundbreaking

00:07discovery.

00:08Nearly every galaxy in the universe appears to have a supermassive black hole at its center.

00:15Some are millions or even billions of times more massive than our Sun.

00:19Along with these cosmic heavyweights, galaxies also contain countless smaller black holes.

00:26These form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and usually have a mass of

00:31less than a hundred times that of the Sun.

00:34But in between these extremes is something much harder to find, intermediate mass black

00:39holes.

00:41They range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun.

00:47These black holes are tricky to detect because they don't constantly feed on gas and stars.

00:53They don't shine unless they're caught in the act of eating a nearby star.

00:58That's what makes tidal disruption events so important.

01:01When a star strays too close to a black hole, it gets torn apart and the black hole unleashes

01:07a burst of energy.

01:09Hubble and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up to study one of these rare events

01:15in a galaxy called NGC 6099, where a source known as HLX-1 lit up the sky.

01:23Chandra detected powerful X-rays with temperatures around 3 million degrees, exactly what you'd

01:29expect from a star being devoured.

01:32Hubble examined the same location in ultraviolet and optical light, revealing a dense cluster

01:38of stars surrounding the black hole.

01:41These stars are packed so tightly that they're only a few light months apart, about 500 billion

01:47miles, providing a convenient potential food source for the black hole.

01:52This discovery shows the importance of different telescopes looking at the universe in different

01:57types of light.

01:59Unique telescopes working together can paint the full picture of what's happening in our

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