Massive Black Hole

By: David Bradley

massive black holeA massive, or rather supermassive, black hole, millions of times the mass of the sun, has been spotted by UK and German astronomers.

The team from the Centre for Astrophysics Research at the University of Hertfordshire and Remeis-Sternwarte at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg discovered a short-lived massive star, crisply named HE 0437-5439, which is moving at such a high speed through the outer halo of the Milky Way and into intergalactic space, that it could only have been sent on its way by something of enormous bulk - a massive black hole!

The finding has come as a big surprise to the astronomers as massive stars have lifetimes of only some tens or hundreds of million years and the halo does not usually host stars as young as HE 0437-5439, which the team has estimated is 30 million years old. The position of the star in the sky has raised many questions as to how it came to be in its present location. Stars can be ejected by supermassive black holes as the one known in the centre of our Milky Way. However, a Milky Way origin for 0437-5439 is unlikely.

This has led the astronomers to suspect that the star could have travelled its current distance if it were ejected from the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), from where at the time of the observation it was 16 degrees away. The astronomers look forward to having these and other questions answered by forthcoming astrometric space missions such as GAIA which is due to be launched in 2011. Work on this project was supported by the Particle Physics Astronomy Council (PPARC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

 


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