A coma-shaped molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way appears to orbit one of the most sought-after objects in astronomy. At the center of the Pugolovka orbit, the team of astronomers saw exactly nothing. And nothing that attracts something just screams “black hole”.

Simulations show that this will not be just an ordinary black hole, but belongs to the rare medium weight class; medium-mass “missing link” black holes. If so, it would be the fifth intermediate black hole candidate located near the galactic centre.

This increasing number of previously elusive objects could help astronomers understand how supermassive black holes form at the centers of galaxies and then grow to such gigantic sizes.

“In this paper, we report the discovery of an isolated, peculiar, compact cloud,” writes a team of astronomers led by Miyuki Kaneko of Keio University in Japan.

“The spatial compactness of Pugolovka and the absence of bright analogues at other wavelengths suggest that the object may be an intermediate-mass black hole.”

Black holes in the universe tend to be in two different mass regimes. There are stellar-mass black holes that are about 100 times the mass of the Sun. Black holes are formed as a result of the collapse of the core of a massive star at the end of its life or the merger of such black holes.

There are also supermassive black holes. These are giant necklaces located at the centers of galaxies, with masses millions and billions of times greater than the mass of the Sun. It’s not clear how these objects formed, and that’s a cosmic mystery that astronomers want to solve.

The answers can be found among medium-mass black holes. Detection of these intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) will be proof that black holes cover the entire mass range equally, and that intermediate holes are the growth stage between the titch and the behemoth. However, only a few of these medium-weight objects have been identified, and mostly only temporarily.

One problem is that black holes alone do not emit light on their own. They can only be detected by the immense gravity around them, causing matter to spin in a furious fury, or pulling the fabric of space-time in a special way.

This subtle pull can affect the orbital dance of distant objects, such as stars, that astronomers are studying to control Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The galactic center is actually quite a crowded place. It is dense with molecular clouds of the kind that give birth to stars. It is known as the Central Molecular Region, and its molecular gas density is several times higher than that of the Milky Way disk.