So far we have found two types of black holes: supermassive, with a mass of one to billions of times the mass of the Sun, and stellar-mass, weighing up to 12 times the mass of the Sun. Now, a team Scientists from the University of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (USA) have located evidence of a new black hole that would be found straddling these two varieties since it has an intermediate mass of about 5,000 times the mass of the Sun.
The finding of this medium-sized object known as NGC1313X-1 (an ultra-luminous X-ray source) would be added to the list of possible black holes of this size, adding more weight to this theory about the existence of a new category of black hole. .
To locate it, the astronomers used data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite . Previous research had identified a black hole that weighed 400 times the mass of the Sun using data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite.
“This result provides support for the idea that black holes exist at all size scales . When describing something for the first time, there is always some doubt. The identification of a second candidate with a different instrument puts weight behind both findings and gives us confidence in our technique ”, explains Dheeraj Pasham, leader of the study.
“To make an analogy with acoustic instruments, if we imagine that stellar-mass black holes are the violin and supermassive black holes are the double bass, intermediate-mass black holes are the cello, ” says Francesco Tombesi, co-author of the study.
The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters .
