New Evidence For "Survivor" Black Holes In M82
Thursday, April 29, 2010 - 13:10
in Astronomy & Space
Astronomers have found signatures in X-ray data suggesting that two mid-sized black holes exist close to the center of the nearby starburst galaxy M82, located 12 million light years from Earth. These "survivor" black holes avoided falling into the center of the galaxy and could be examples of the seeds required for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies, including the one in the Milky Way. For several decades, scientists have had strong evidence for two distinct classes of black hole: the stellar-mass variety with masses about ten times that of the Sun, and the supermassive ones, located at the center of galaxies, that range from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses. read more