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Astronomers appear to have discovered and determined the mass of a black hole that is moving through the galaxy using the Hubble telescope.
Teams from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the University of California, Berkeley cooperated to collect the data. This marks the first time Hubble’s gravitational microlensing, which measures galactic objects by observing the affected light of stars around the objects, has found such a black hole.
As the discovery is still new, there had been speculation as to whether it is a black hole or a neutron star. Neutron stars are dense and compact like black holes, with one difference between them — their mass.
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UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Astronomy Jessica Lu and graduate student Casey Lam estimate the object’s mass is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun, and black holes are should be 2.2 times heavier than solar masses when they collapse into a hole.
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Meanwhile, Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute estimated the object’s mass is 7.1 solar masses. As a result, the institute has determined it to be a black hole.
MOA-2011-BLG-191 and OB110462, the STSI’s and UC Berkley’s corresponding names for the black hole, is currently careening the galaxy going somewhere between 30 to 45 kilometers per second. That means it could travel to the Earth and its moon in just three hours. It is an especially fast speed when compared to other stars.
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This latest discovery, over 5,000 light-years away in the Carina-Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy, will further help astronomers understand the life cycle of a star, and therefore the galaxy.
