This new type of black hole opens up great research potential that humans have never thought of.
Cosmic black holes are a mysterious concept to us. Despite decades of research, what has been gained from cosmic black holes is still only salt compared to the potential knowledge they offer.
Based on the little knowledge about black holes, humans divide it into two types based on their size. One type is a small crater, with a mass several dozen times that of the Sun. The other is a supermassive black hole, which is “massive” millions, if not billions of times, than the solar system’s fireball.
Recently, however, it continues to surprise us, when scientists uncover evidence of a completely different type of black hole, with a size somewhere in between. They call it a medium-sized black hole, and it’s 740 million light years away.
Concretely, this black hole is located in a very large galaxy. Thanks to the bursts of X-rays emitted when a black hole swallows a star, scientists can confirm its existence.
“Comparing the data, it appears that this star was ‘hit’ around October 2003, creating bursts of energy about 10 years later.”
Strader and his colleagues found this evidence in the data block provided by XMM-Newton, the rocket from the European Space Agency ESA. However, they didn’t expect to see the last sight of a star, when it was attacked by a medium-sized black hole. And with the existence of this black hole, it proves that there are many black holes of similar size in the universe.
