Astronomers have found a very small region of 800 solar masses wreaking havoc on nearby stars; all point to a medium-mass black hole just 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpio. If the discovery is successful, it could add to growing evidence that the universe is kind to such cosmic middleweights, of which only a few have been found so far.

“It’s too small for us to explain, except that it’s a single black hole,” said Eduardo Vitral, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland and lead author of an upcoming study. to find. Tuesday (23 May). “Alternatively, there may be a stellar mechanism we don’t know about, at least within the confines of modern physics.”

Most of the black holes found to date, including about 100 million Milky Way galaxyIt comes in two sizes: tiny black holes with a mass of 10-100 times that of the Sun, and giant black holes that are several million or even billions of times heavier than the Sun.

Medium-sized black holes that astronomers believe are at the centers of small galaxies and fed by stars like the one below. dirty babies, is much more difficult to notice and even more difficult to confirm, due to the lack of explanations for their occurrence and the difficulty of weighing them accurately. While the evidence for many candidates is still inconclusive, in 2014 astronomers approvedsuch a medium-sized black hole lurks about 12 light-years from Earth.

Now the Vitral team believe they have discovered another ‘gravity hole’, this time much closer to home. After analyzing the data Hubble Space Telescope A medium-sized black hole weighing about 800 solar masses, 12 years away from a nearby star cluster called Messier 4 (or M4), may be the heart of M4, an ancient Chumatsky member, astronomers say. Its orbit is now a path that orbits our galaxy approximately once every 116 million years.

Like all black holes, this last one cannot be seen directly. Instead, the team used data from the Gaia spacecraft. For the European Space Agency’s Star Mapping Project, team members were caught in the gravitational field of the putative black hole “like bees swarming around a hive” to study the chaotic motion of stars at the center of M4. image description.

While the existence of a black hole has yet to be confirmed, current models suggest that such a single compact region with such a high mass cannot be formed by other processes. Vitral’s team ran numerical simulations to see whether the mass of 800 suns could be produced by a group of black holes or soon by black holes such as neutron stars or white dwarfs, and found that what Hubble observed was more compact than the simulations. capable of producing.

“Unless the object is a single medium-mass black hole, it would need about 40 smaller black holes compressed into space with a diameter of just one-tenth of a light-year to produce the observed motions of stars,” the team members wrote. same expression. “As a result, they converge and/or pop out during an interstellar game of pinball.”