NASA today shared a rather interesting update on the course of the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers with the Paris Institute of Astrophysics (IAP) use the telescope to study spherical cluster NGC 6397, where they were looking for a black hole between the masses. Global systems, as NASA describes them, are ‘extremely dense galaxies that house stars that have been closely joined together’, with NGC 6397 in particular only about 7,800 light-years from Earth.
The astronomers who studied NGC 6397 – Eduardo Vitral and Gary Mamon, both of the IAP – were looking for a black mass in this spherical group. As the name suggests, interstellar black holes are a theoretical third type of black hole that has grown between supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies and the black masses that result from the collapse of stars. As NASA noted in a blog post today, only a few black-wave candidates have been identified among the masses.
If Vitral and Mamon could find a black hole in NGC 6397, it would be a great discovery. What they found there was something else. ‘We found very strong evidence for an invisible mass in the dense core of the spherical group, but we were surprised to find that this extra mass is not’ point-like ‘(this would be expected for a solid black hole) , but has expanded. to a few percent of the size of the group, ”Vitral said.
Further analysis of the stars’ motions – which had been collected over several years – indicated that this extra mass was actually a collection of smaller, stellar masses of black holes. “We used the theory of stellar evolution to conclude that most of the extra mass we found was in the form of black holes,” Mamon said.
Although Vitral and Mamon did not find the black hole of the middle mass that they thought was in the middle of NGC 6397, they still made a fascinating discovery, as this is the first time that a collection of black masses of stellar mass is . in the middle of a dense spherical group like this discovered. Watch the video above for more information on this discovery, as well as some nicer images from NGC 6397.