The Hubble Space Telescope's evidence of an "intermediate-sized" black hole about 6000 light-years away in the closest globular star cluster to our home planet.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Paul Morris: Lead Producer.
Music Credit:
Tesseract by Cody Johnson [ASCAP] and Gina Kouyoumdjian [BMI] via Emperia Alpha Publishing [ASCAP], Emperia Beta Publishing [BMI], and Universal Production Music
Animation Credit:
Black Hole accreting material animation by Aurore Simmonet.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Paul Morris: Lead Producer.
Music Credit:
Tesseract by Cody Johnson [ASCAP] and Gina Kouyoumdjian [BMI] via Emperia Alpha Publishing [ASCAP], Emperia Beta Publishing [BMI], and Universal Production Music
Animation Credit:
Black Hole accreting material animation by Aurore Simmonet.
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TechTranscript
00:00It's estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes created from exploded stars,
00:07while the universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes weighing millions or billions of times our Sun's mass
00:15and found in the centers of galaxies.
00:18A long-sought missing link between the two is an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing in at hundreds to thousands of solar masses.
00:28Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have possibly detected one of these elusive intermediate-mass black holes
00:36in the core of the globular star cluster Messier 4, located 6,000 light-years away from Earth.
00:43They calculated the suspected black hole's mass by studying the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field
00:50using 12.5 years' worth of Messier 4 observations from Hubble.
00:55The researchers estimate that the black hole could be as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun.
01:02Thanks to Hubble's high-precision observations over a long period of time,
01:07scientists can search the skies to help us uncover the mysteries of this missing link
01:12and better understand our place in the universe.
01:25Transcription by ESO. Translation by —