Scientists now believe they’ve observed a Jupiter-sized, mysterious black hole that’s occasionally wandering through Milky Way galaxy. As we already know, astronomers cannot directly see black holes, but they detected a sort of a celestial cloud structure with a weird behavior that might have only one plausible explanation – a black hole.
The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a series of 66 radio telescopes spread across the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile, to do some readings about the mysterious space objects that wandering in our galaxy.
“When I checked the ALMA data for the first time, I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking,” explained the study’s leading author Shunya Takekawa, a physicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
Mysterious Black Hole Is Wandering Through Milky Way
In May 2018, Shunya Takekawa and his co-workers used the ALMA to analyze two gas clouds they nicknamed Balloon and Stream according to their shapes. According to the readings, the gas clouds seemed to move mysteriously, spinning around an invisible core. Thanks to those movements, the scientists measured that the object at the center of the swirling, which is the size of Jupiter, packs about 30,000 solar masses.
According to that data, plus that the space object is not releasing any form of light, the Jupiter-sized space body is nothing else than a mysterious, medium-sized black hole that is wandering through Milky Way.
The discovery is of great importance for the scientific community since astronomers have only observed tiny or supermassive black holes. Medium-sized black holes are, therefore, rare findings, even though scientists believe they are numerous in the Universe. Until now, only other two medium black holes have been spotted near Sagittarius A, in the center of our galaxy, and astronomers believe they are escapees of the before-mentioned supermassive black hole of Milky Way.
Jasmine holds a Master’s in Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto and writes professionally in a broad variety of genres. She has worked as a senior manager in public relations and communications for major telecommunication companies, and is the former Deputy Director for Media Relations with the Modern Coalition. Jasmine writes primarily in our LGBTTQQIAAP and Science section.