With the help of the Hubble space telescopes and the Chandra X-ray observatory, astronomers managed to discover a rare black hole. It belongs to the class of wandering medium-mass black holes and received the designation HLX-1. This object is located on the outskirts of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 6099, which is approximately 453 million light-years from Earth. informs Space.
The black hole was detected thanks to the intense X-ray emission that results from a so-called tidal collapse event — when a black hole rips a nearby star apart before absorbing it. According to observations, the temperature of this radiation reached 3 million degrees Celsius, which confirms the extreme nature of the event.
A dense cluster of stars was recorded near HLX-1. Probably, one of them was destroyed by the black hole. Scientists suggest that HLX-1 was once the central black hole of a dwarf galaxy that was later absorbed by NGC 6099. As a result, HLX-1 has become a kind of “wanderer” — a black hole that is no longer at the center of its original system.
This discovery is particularly valuable for understanding the process of formation of supermassive black holes that reside in the cores of galaxies. According to one theory, such giant objects could be formed by the merging of several intermediate-mass black holes during a galactic merger. In this case, the detection of HLX-1 demonstrates that such objects can exist on the periphery of large galaxies, without necessarily falling into their center.
There is also an alternative hypothesis, according to which, in the early universe, some gas clouds collapsed directly into supermassive black holes instead of forming stars. The new data obtained from HLX-1 allow us to better weigh the arguments of both models and deepen our understanding of the evolution of cosmic structures.
