It’s estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes created
from exploded stars, while the universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes,
weighing millions or billions of times our Sun’s mass and found in the centers of galaxies.
A long-sought missing link between the two is an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing
in at hundreds to thousands of solar masses. Astronomers, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope,
have possibly detected one of these elusive intermediate-mass black holes in the core
of the globular star cluster Messier 4, located 6,000 light years away from Earth.
They calculated the suspected black hole’s mass by studying the motion of stars caught in its
gravitational field using 12 and a half years’ worth of Messier 4 observations from Hubble.
The researchers estimate that the black hole could be as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun.
Thanks to Hubble’s high precision observations over a long period of time,
scientists can search the skies to help us uncover the mysteries of this missing link,
and better understand our place in the universe.
Follow us on social media @NASAHubble