{"id":49938,"date":"2025-07-31T11:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T11:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/49938\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T11:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T11:45:08","slug":"stars-violent-death-could-reveal-a-rare-missing-link-black-hole-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/49938\/","title":{"rendered":"Star’s Violent Death Could Reveal a Rare ‘Missing Link’ Black Hole : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a galaxy some 450 million light-years away, a brilliant flare of light revealed a probable black hole<\/a> that suddenly woke from its slumber to snack on a passing star. This is not, in itself, a hugely unusual occurrence.<\/p>\n

The sting in this particular tail is the identity of the black hole in question: an elusive middleweight, or intermediate-mass black hole<\/a>. This is a mass range so rarely spotted<\/a> that its absence has posed a huge challenge to our understanding of supermassive black hole formation.<\/p>\n

Black holes, you see, usually come in two distinct mass regimes. There are the stellar-mass black holes, which fall in the same sort of mass range as stars, up to about 100 or so Suns’ worth of mass. These form when a massive star goes supernova, leaving the core behind to collapse under gravity, becoming a black hole.<\/p>\n

A supermassive black hole is millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. These behemoths lurk in the centers of galaxies, forming a gravitational hub. How we get supermassive black holes is a huge mystery, although one astronomers are closing in on.<\/p>\n

Related: This Could Be The First Witnessed Birth of a Supermassive Black Hole<\/a><\/p>\n

One possible pathway is growth<\/a> from a stellar mass black hole seed \u2013 but the big problem with this is that astronomers have found shockingly few black holes between around 100 and 1 million solar masses. If black holes grow from stellar mass to supermassive, you’d expect to see the Universe peppered with objects partway through that journey.<\/p>\n

\"\"HLX-1 is located around 40,000 light-years from the center of its host galaxy. (NASA, ESA, CXC, Yi-Chi Chang\/National Tsing Hua University<\/a>)<\/p>\n

This is where an X-ray source called HLX-1 comes in. This object, located in a not-too-distant galaxy, has been caught emitting very bright X-rays. It appeared in X-ray observations in 2009; by 2012, it was 100 times brighter. By 2023, it was dimmer again.<\/p>\n

The wonderful thing about the light emitted by an object as it is devoured by a black hole is that it can tell us about the black hole’s size. The light emitted by HLX-1 was too bright to be a stellar-mass black hole; but not at the level of a supermassive black hole.<\/p>\n

The best fit for the observed light and the changes it underwent, according to a team led by astronomer Yi-Chi Chang of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, is an intermediate-mass object, between around 1,000 and 10,000 solar masses, waking up and having a snack. Whether it was a one-off snack or an orbiting star from which the black hole takes periodic bites is yet to be determined.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

“Now we need to wait and see if it’s flaring multiple times, or there was a beginning, there was peak, and now it’s just going to go down all the way until it disappears,” says astronomer Roberto Soria<\/a> of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.<\/p>\n

Whichever way it goes, the discovery is an exciting one, advancing what we know about the most gravitationally extreme objects in the Universe.<\/p>\n

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a galaxy some 450 million light-years away, a brilliant flare of light revealed a probable black hole…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1352,79,193],"class_list":["post-49938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-msft-content","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}