![]() Gravitational waves lend a hand in the search Tentative detections of intermediate-mass black holes have been made in the past, but various uncertainties made it difficult to determine whether the detections really were the “missing link” in the black hole size spectrum after all. Astronomers have been searching for intermediate-mass black holes for years, and many believe that these mid-sized black holes could be precursors to the much-larger supermassive black holes, helping to explain how supermassive black holes form in the first place. ![]() In between these two ends of the spectrum are intermediate-mass black holes, which range in mass from 100 to 1,000,000 times the mass of the Sun. The very first image of a supermassive black hole was taken in April of last year. They’re believed to exist at the centres of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, but astronomers still aren’t entirely sure how these enormous black holes form. Supermassive black holes, on the other hand, are millions (or billions) of times more massive than stellar-mass black holes. ![]() The innermost regions of these stars collapse in on themselves, forming a black hole in the process. Stellar-mass black holes are those less than about a hundred times the mass of the Sun, and they’re formed when high-mass stars end their lives in massive supernova explosions. This infinitely-dense point is known as the black hole’s gravitational singularity.Īstronomers typically group black holes into three main categories: stellar-mass black holes, intermediate-mass black holes, and supermassive black holes. At the centres of black holes, enormous amounts of mass are compressed into infinitely small spaces, and the laws of physics begin to break down. ![]() Not too big, not too smallĪ black hole is a region in space with an incredibly strong gravitational field - so strong, in fact, that not even light can escape if it gets too close. The results included contributions from the Université de Montréal, and were published in Physical Review Letters. Now, thanks to new observations from the Virgo and LIGO Scientific Collaborations, astronomers finally have direct evidence that intermediate-mass black holes do indeed exist. Astronomers have long theorized about the existence of intermediate-mass black holes: gravitational singularities midway in size between the small, stellar-mass black holes that form when giant stars die and the supermassive black holes that lurk at the hearts of galaxies. ![]()
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