Now, pursuing that one clue, astronomers have found a black hole in a cluster outside the Milky Way. This is the first black hole ever seen outside our own galaxy with this technique.
Reported from Space, Thursday (11/11), astronomers made the discovery of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) atop a desert mountain in northern Chile. The researchers set the VLT’s sights on NGC 1850, a cluster located in the adjacent Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Here, scientists can see thousands of stars at once.
An astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, Sara Saracino said they saw stars in clusters much like Sherlock Holmes tracking criminal gangs from their missteps.
“We looked at every star in this cluster with a magnifying glass in one hand, trying to find some evidence of the existence of a black hole but without seeing it directly,” Saracino said in a statement.
The researchers observed the motion of the stars for signs of phantom black holes. The smoking gun, as if it were a simple star about five times the mass of the sun. Astronomers found a subtle error in the star’s motion: a sign of a black hole orbiting the star.
The mastermind is a black hole with a mass about 11 times the sun. Its home, a star cluster called NGC 1850, is only about 100 million years old, arguably infancy on the cosmic scale. No black hole, astronomers say, has ever been found in a cluster so young.
This research will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Now, researchers think the same technique could help find other black holes in other dark corners of the universe, helping us understand how these strange objects age and evolve.
“The results shown here represent only one of the wanted criminals, but once you have found it, you are well on your way to finding many more, in different clusters,” Saracino said.
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