A black hole 500 times greater than the mass of the Sun has been discovered thanks to the XMM-Newton telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA). According to experts, the so -called HLX-1 would belong to a new type of intermediate object between "supermassive" black holes , of several million to several billion solar mass (located in the center of most galaxies), and black holes of 3 to 20 solar masses , remnants of the death of massive stars .
It is not yet known how supermassive black holes form at the center of galaxies. "One of the hypotheses is that these black holes are formed by the agglomeration of smaller black holes, that is, black holes of intermediate size or mass," explained one of the study's authors, Didier Barret, an astrophysicist at the Center for Studies Radications Space (CESR) of Toulouse.
HLX-1 was detected as an ultra-luminous source of X-rays 290 million light years from Earth (on the periphery of the galaxy ESO 243-49). "Its luminosity in X-rays is exceptional: about 260 million times the total luminosity of the Sun", its discoverers explain in the latest issue of the journal Nature . As it falls into the black hole, they add, matter forms an accretion disk, heats up, and emits X-rays before being "engulfed" by this ogre from space.
