A star being torn apart by an intermediate-mass black hole, surrounded by an accretion disc is seen in an artist’s impression obtained by Reuters April 2, 2020. This thin, rotating disc of material consists of the leftovers of a star which was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS.
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and two X-ray observatories, the researchers determined that this black hole is more than 50,000 times the mass of our sun and located 740 million light years from Earth in a dwarf galaxy, one containing far fewer stars than our Milky Way.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects possessing gravitational pulls so powerful that not even light can escape.
This is one of the few “intermediate-mass” black holes ever identified, being far smaller than the supermassive black holes that reside at the center of large galaxies but far larger than so-called stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive individual stars.
“We confirmed that an object that we discovered originally back in 2010 is indeed an intermediate-mass black hole that ripped apart and swallowed a passing star,” said University of Toulouse astrophysicist Natalie Webb, a co-author of the study published this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The star was probably roughly a third the mass of the sun, Webb said.
Webb said scientists have searched for intermediate-mass black holes for four decades and fewer than 10 good examples are known, though large numbers may exist.
“So finding a new one is very significant. Also, a black hole swallowing a star happens on average only once every 10,000 years or so in any particular galaxy so these are rare occurrences,” Webb added.[…]
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