New research from A team from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University showed that the large Magellan Cloud is a dwarf galaxy adjacent to the Milky Way, a gravitational structure that is hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole.
The most widely accepted theory of the evolution of the Milky Way believes that super-large black holes can only be found in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. So far, there is no reason to imagine a small cluster like a large barley cloud that can accommodate one. When X-ray telescopes or observations are already being trained on smaller clusters, such as the barley cloud, they find no signatures related to black hole activity.
But then there were high-speed stars. In nearly 20 years, astronomers have discovered fast-traveling stars and popped out of their own galaxies with enough acceleration. Traditional stars move at a speed of about 100 kilometers per second, while high-speed stars travel 10 times faster. Experts believe that such stars appear by “ejecting outward” by supermass gravitational structures under the hill mechanism, where the binary star system interacts with black holes, one of which is captured by the black hole, and the other star from it. capture.
In the Milky Way itself, it is possible that the speeding stars originated here. Research shows that they are accelerated by Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. However, at least 21 high-speed stars detected were consistent with being popped up by super black holes, but could not be related to the intrinsic activity of the Milky Way. In the team’s simulation, it is reasonable that these stars originate from the malt cloud.
For the team led by Jiwon Jesse Han, this is one of the first major evidence of supermassive black holes in our neighboring Dwarf Milky Way. According to the team’s initial calculations, this black hole structure could be between 251,000 and 1 million solar energy. Its average mass will be 600,000 times that of the sun.
The study is currently in preprint, but will be published in the Journal of Astrophysics, data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, whose purpose is to map millions of stars to calculate their motion.
Of course, there may be other explanations for this phenomenon. Stars that escape from galaxies may also originate from supernovae or any other mechanism of ability that is energetic to pop them out. However, the author of this article explains that it seems that the speeding stars from the large Magellan clouds do not seem to be the case.
The large Magellan cloud is an irregularly shaped Milky Way that rotates the Milky Way, as well as other clusters of dwarfs such as Sagittarius, Karina, or Draco. It is 163,000 light-years of the Earth and has a diameter of about 14,000 light-years. Astronomers believe that in the distant future (about 2.4 billion years), the barley cloud and the Milky Way will merge into a larger cluster, along with other larger structures, such as the Andromeda Galaxy. Experts believe that the merger process will be slow and will not cause any problems on the scale of the planet.
This story originally appeared in wired español and has been translated into Spanish.
