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NASA’s Hubble Telescope Uncovers Concentration of Small Black Holes

NASA’s Hubble Telescope Uncovers Concentration of Small Black Holes

There’s some new exciting news for all the space enthusiasts out there! NASA has revealed that its Hubble telescope has uncovered a concentration of small black holes at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 639. Astronomers thought that the globular cluster hosted an intermediate-mass black hole.

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"We found very strong evidence for an invisible mass in the dense core of the globular cluster, but we were surprised to find that this extra mass is not 'point-like' (that would be expected for a solitary massive black hole) but extended to a few per cent of the size of the cluster," said Eduardo Vitral of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics (IAP) in Paris, France. He further added, “ours is the first study to provide both the mass and the extent of what appears to be a collection of mostly black holes in the centre of a core-collapsed globular cluster”.

NASA describes globular clusters as extremely dense stellar systems, which host stars that are closely packed together. These systems are also typically very old and the globular cluster at the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the universe itself. This cluster resides 7,800 light-years away, making it one of the closest globular clusters to Earth.

The report states that Vitral and Gary Mamon, also of IAP, used the velocities of stars in the cluster to detect the elusive hidden mass and determine the distribution of its total mass, that is the mass in the visible stars, faint stars and black holes. Researchers conclude that the invisible component can only be made of the remnants of massive stars (white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes) given its mass, extent, and location.

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These “stellar corpses” progressively sank to the cluster's centre after gravitational interactions with nearby less massive stars. This game of stellar pinball is called "dynamical friction,". Under this phenomenon, an exchange of momentum takes place because of which heavier stars are segregated in the cluster's core and lower-mass stars migrate to the cluster's periphery.

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