00:00Just a few years after its launch in 1990, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope made a groundbreaking
00:06discovery.
00:08Nearly every galaxy in the universe appears to have a supermassive black hole at its center.
00:14Some 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.
00:25These 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.
00:33But in between these extremes is something much harder to find, intermediate mass black
00:39holes.
00:40They range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun.
00:46These black holes are tricky to detect because they don't constantly feed on gas and stars.
00:52They don't shine unless they're caught in the act of eating a nearby star.
00:57That'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 of
01:38stars surrounding the black hole.
01:40These 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
02:04universe.
02:04The universe.
02:05The universe.
Comments