Black holes are a serious matter in the science world, and although it may not affect your daily life, new discoveries are being made all the time in the field. In fact, black holes are now known to follow the McDonald's theory of sizing by coming in three sizes: small, medium and extra large, according to a new study.
"Stellar-mass" black holes at one extreme weigh as much as dozens of suns. That only scratches the surface, though. At the other end of the spectrum are "supermassive" black holes that contain millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. These black holes likely exist in most galaxies, if not all.
"Objects in this range are the least expected of all black holes," study co-author Richard Mushotzky, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. "Astronomers have been asking, 'Do these objects exist, or do they not exist? What are their properties?' Until now, we have not had the data to answer these questions."
Black holes are known for absorbing any light that gets too close to it. However astronomers can see them with bright X-ray light streams from the super hot disk of material spiraling into a black hole's mouth. Scientific researchers have seen shades of the much rarer medium-sized black holes that contain between 100 and several hundred thousand solar masses.
While it was first thought to be to difficult to weigh these objects accurately, the argument can be settled now that a research team has been able to measure an intermediate black hole's mass with pinpoint precision. Their findings conclude that a black hole in a neighboring galaxy weighs in at roughly 428 solar masses, or a hundred suns or so.
"For reasons that are very hard to understand, these objects have resisted standard measurement techniques," Mushotzky said. In the new study, Maryland doctoral student Dheeraj Pasham and his team took a closer look at the black hole known as M82 X-1. The team took the time to analyze the observations that were made from the years 2004 to 2010 by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE).
"In essence, the frequency of these 3:2 ratio oscillations scales inverse[ly] with black hole mass," Pasham told Space.com. "Simply put, if the black hole is small, the orbital periods at the innermost circular orbit are shorter, but if the black hole is big, the orbital periods are longer with smaller frequencies."
For more on this research, head on over to Nature.
