CNN Indonesia
Monday, 20 Feb 2023 20:15 WIB
Illustration. The comma-shaped molecular cloud could be a clue to the medium-sized black hole that scientists have been looking for. (Photo: iStockphoto/Cappan)
Jakarta, CNNIndonesia —
A molecular cloud shaped like a comma is called a pointer black hole that astronomers have been looking for. What does it look like black hole the?
Launch Science Alert, astronomers discovered the comma-shaped molecular cloud using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. The cloud looks disturbed by a gravity.
The cloud, which was later named Tadpole, appears to be close to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is 27 thousand light years away. It moves differently from the material around it.
The shape of the cloud stretches so that experts think, the cloud is attracted by a very strong gravity. After going through the modeling, the experts found that the mass of the object that attracted the clouds was in the range of 100,000 times the mass of the sun.
Experts also suspect that the mass belongs to a medium-sized black hole, which they have been looking for.
“In this paper, we report the findings of an isolated and suspicious cloud. The spatial density of the Tadpole and the absence of a bright tandem object in other wavelengths indicates the possibility of a medium-sized black hole,” said Miyuki Kaneko of Keio University, Japan. in Astrophysical Journal.
Medium-sized black holes are considered to be the answer to the question of how black holes are formed. The reason is, so far experts have only managed to find two categories of black holes that are commonly found.
First, there are black holes that have a star-like mass, which is 100 times the mass of the Sun.
These black holes are formed from colliding stars at the end of their lives, or a combination of holes
Then, there are black holes that fall into the unusually large category (supermassive black hole). These black holes are usually located at the center of galaxies, with masses reaching millions to billions of times that of the Sun.
Finding a medium-sized black hole is difficult. This is because black holes do not emit light from themselves.
Black holes can only be detected by their gravitational effects on the objects around them.
Furthermore, experts will follow up on these findings. They will use the facilities at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submilimter Array in Chile to confirm the findings.
If it is indeed a medium-sized black hole, this finding could have significant implications for human understanding of black holes.
(lth)
