Mid-Sized Black Hole Found Hiding in Globular Cluster

By Jesse Emspak

For decades, astronomers have tracked black holes with masses millions of times that of the sun, as well as those with tens of solar masses. But black holes between those two extremes have proved elusive. Now, astronomers studying a globular cluster have found just such a black hole at its center, showing that intermediate-mass black holes could be hiding out in these compact agglomerations of stars.

Lead study author Bülent Kiziltan, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and his co-authors Holger Baumgardt (of Australia’s University of Queensland) and Abraham Loeb (also of CfA) found a black hole between 1,400 and 3,700 solar masses at the center of 47 Tucanae, a globular cluster in the southern sky some 16,700 light-years from Earth.

Black holes are usually found because they emit massive amounts of X-rays as matter falls in. Midsize black-hole candidates have been found in galaxies; a group from the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center found one in another galaxy in 2015, and there are about a dozen objects in total. [The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]

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