Rare Species of Black Hole Might Lurk in the Andromeda Galaxy

Black holes remain one of the most elusive and mysterious types of space objects. It couldn’t be otherwise when we’re talking about space objects that defy even the laws of physics themselves.

Nobody knows for sure what happens with matter that falls into a black hole. The best guess is that it gets lost forever. And “Interstellar” was a great movie, but profoundly unscientific regarding the scene when Matthew McConaughey’s character traveled back in time after he fell into a black hole.

But the mystery gets expanded even further when scientists discover that there is more than one type of black hole out there in the Cosmos. They might have just found a rare species of these cosmic monsters in the neighbor galaxy Andromeda, according to Gizmodo.com.

A Intermediate-mass black hole might exist in a globular cluster

The globular cluster known as B023-G078, which is located in the Andromeda galaxy, is now believed to be harboring an intermediate-mass black hole. It’s a rare species of black hole that was never observed. Instead, its existence was predicted long ago. If the information is correct, the rare species of black holes is hiding at the heart of the globular cluster that has a mass of over 6 million Suns.

In an email to Gizmodo, Anil Seth, an astrophysicist from the University of Utah, said:

The most interesting thing about this IMBH is its location—it is in a massive star cluster around Andromeda that we think is actually the core of a former dwarf galaxy whose outskirts were stripped away by Andromeda’s gravity,

Based on previous work in higher mass stripped nuclei, simulations, and this work, it seems like these stripped galaxy nuclei may actually be the most common environment for IMBHs (i.e. there may be more of them in stripped galaxy nuclei than in present day galaxy nuclei).

The new study was published in The Astrophysical Journal.