A team of researchers reported the first-ever discovery of a black hole in a globular star cluster in our Milky Way Galaxy.
This
Chandra X-ray image of the Messier 62′s central region shows the black
hole M62-VLA1, orange circle. A red cross marks the cluster photometric
center. Image credit: Laura Chomiuk et al.
In 2007, Dr Tom
Maccarone from Texas Tech University made the first discovery of a black
hole in a globular star cluster in the neighboring NGC 4472 galaxy. But
rather than finding it by using radio waves, he detected it by seeing
an X-ray emission from the gas falling into the black hole and heating
up to a few million degrees.
“Six years ago I had made the first
discoveries in other galaxies. It’s surprisingly easier to find them in
other galaxies than in our own, even though they’re a thousand times as
far away as these in our own galaxy are,” Dr Maccarone said.
This year, the astrophysicist and his colleagues used the
Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico to discover a black hole in the Milky Way globular cluster Messier 62.
Messier 62
(M62), also known as NGC 6266, is a globular cluster located in the
constellation Ophiuchus about 35,000 light-years away. It measures 110
light-years across and carries around 1 million times the mass of the
Sun.
The newly discovered black hole, named M62-VLA1, is the
so-called stellar-mass black hole, a type of black holes that comes from
the collapse of a massive star.
“Globular star clusters are large
groupings of stars thought to contain some of the oldest stars in the
Universe. In the same distance from our Sun to the nearest neighbor,
Proxima Centauri, its nearest neighbor, these globular star clusters could have a million to tens of millions of stars.”
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