This is a cool new result. Astronomers went looking for a giant black hole in the center of a globular cluster (a clump of very old stars). Instead, they found what appears to be a SWARM of smaller black holes -- the kind made when massive stars die.https://esahubble.org/news/heic2103/?lang …
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It's interesting for a few reasons! One is that it gives clues about the formation of "intermediate-mass black holes" -- those in the gap between dead-star-mass and supermassive (million-solar-mass or more objects, found in the centers of galaxies), even by not finding one.
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Another reason this is interesting is that dense cores of globular clusters like this one have been thought to be places where stellar-mass black holes could merge to form larger objects, possibly explaining some of the signals we've detected via gravitational waves.
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En réponse à @AstroKatie
Do you think there’s a chance IMBHs don’t actually exist, and instead we get supermassive BHs when those clusters start merging with each other? Basically a cascade effect of quick (in galactic timescale terms) expansion as everything gets hoovered in?
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En réponse à @ChrisWarcraft
There is some evidence for IMBHs in other observations (e.g., https://esahubble.org/news/heic2005/ ). And merging a swarm of black holes is actually really difficult to do — what you expect to happen is a few merge and in the process fling others out. Actually collapsing a lot is hard.
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Ok cool, thanks for the knowledge!
Le chargement semble prendre du temps.
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