An elusive mid-sized black hole that was tearing apart a wayward star has been spotted by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope. A team of astronomers found the stellar object – known as an ‘intermediate-mass black hole’ – 740 million light-years away using Hubble and X-ray observatories. Experts from the University of New Hampshire in Durham say it is about 50,000 times larger than the Sun and is a ‘missing link’ in the evolution of the universe. The new intermediate-mass black hole is larger than the holes created by the collapse of super-giant stars. The stellar object is considerably smaller than the supermassive black holes found at the centre of galaxies. They say it is larger than the black holes created by the collapse of giant stars but smaller than the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies.
WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them – not even light. They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
NASA spots an elusive giant black hole 50,000 times the mass of the Sun
