New research from A team at the center of astrophysics of Harvard shows that the Great Magnetnik cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is a milky neighbor, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the sun’s mass: a potentially potential black hole.
The most accepted theory of galactic evolution believes that extraordinary black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. So far, there is no reason to imagine that a small cluster like the Great Magnetnik can host one. When X -ray telescopes or observatories are trained on smaller clusters such as the Magellani Greater Cloud, they have found no signature of black hole activity.
But then the HyperVelocity stars came. For nearly 20 years, astronomers have observed fast travel stars with sufficient acceleration that exits their galaxies. While a traditional star moves about 100 kilometers per second, a HyperVelocity star moves up to 10 times faster. Experts think that such stars with “out -of -the -way” appear by an extraordinary gravitational structure under the hills mechanism – where a binary star system interacts with a black hole and a star is captured by black hole And the other goes away.
Within the milk itself, there are excessive stars that are probably originating here. Studies show that they accelerated by Sagittarius A*, a wonderful black hole in the center of the galaxy. But at least 21 stars of the HyperVelocity identified are compatible with pulling out by a super black hole but cannot be associated with the inherent activity of the Milky Way. In team simulations, it is acceptable that these stars originate from the Magellani Greater Cloud instead.
For the team, led by Jean Jesse Han, this is one of the first important evidence to be a wonderful black hole in our neighbor’s dwarf galaxy. According to the team’s initial calculations, this black hole structure can be between 251,000 and 1 million solar mass. Its average mass will be 600,000 times the size of the sun.
The study – currently being published but to be published in Astrophysical Journal – is used by the European Space Agency’s GAIA mission, which aims to mapping millions of stars to calculate their movement.
Of course, it can be another explanation for this phenomenon. The stars that run away from their galaxies can also originate from a supernova or any other energetic mechanism to pull them out. However, the authors of this article explain that it does not appear to be in the case of the HyperVelocity stars that appear to come from the Magellani Greater Cloud.
The Great Magenlanic Cloud is an irregular galaxy that, along with other dwarf star clusters such as Sagittarius, Carina or Draco, is rotating the Milky Way. 163,000 light -years away is from Earth and has a diameter of approximately 14,000 light years. Astronomers believe that in the distant future – about 2.4 billion years – the Great Magnetnik and Milky Way are merged into a larger cluster and with other larger structures such as the Andromeda Galaxy. Experts believe that the integration process will be slow and that it will not cause any problems on a planetary scale.
This story appeared first Wired en español And translated from Spanish.
