There’s a reason black holes are known as the worst villains in our universe. That reason has come to the fore once again as a new survey of more than 100 galaxies shows that these massive objects that don’t even let light through, are blasting thousands of stars to gain weight.
The survey was carried out using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which revealed evolution in our cosmic neighborhood in a survey of 108 galaxies.
A black hole is formed by the death of a star With such a high gravitational field that matter is absorbed into the small space beneath it, trapping the light of the dead star. Gravity is so strong because of matter being squeezed into a small space. Since no light can pass through, people cannot see black holes. They are invisible.
Survey results reveal the violent path taken by the black hole in the vastness of space to reach its current size, which NASA describes as “stellar destruction on a scale rarely seen before.” “
X-rays from Chandra (blue) captured on optical images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of galaxies NGC 1385, NGC 1566, NGC 3344, and NGC 6503. The boxes that appear in the roll-over outline the growing space of black holes. (Photo: NASA)
Using Chandra X-rays and the Hubble Telescope, astronomers have released images of four of 29 galaxies, showing evidence of growing black holes near their centers. They observed very dense clusters of stars in the centers of galaxies. study axriv. has been issued in a preprint on and has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Theoretical work by the team implies that if the density of stars in a cluster – the number packed into a given volume – is above a threshold value, then a The stellar-mass black hole at the center of the cluster It will undergo rapid evolution as it pulls in, cuts through and swallows the abundant neighboring stars nearby.
Astronomers have detailed so far Study of two different classes of black holesThat includes “stellar-mass” black holes, which typically weigh 5 to 30 times the mass of the Sun, and the supermassive black holes that reside in the middle of the largest galaxies, weighing in at millions or even billions of solar masses.
However, recent studies also point to a new in-between class called “intermediate-mass black holes” (IMBHs) and the latest observations suggest that such IMBHs are likely through the rapid evolution of stellar-mass black holes. How are they made from
The process suggested by the latest Chandra study could have happened at any time in the history of the universe, meaning that intermediate-mass black holes could have formed billions of years after the Big Bang, up to the present day.