Astronomers spot possible black hole with stars moving 'like bees swarming around hive'

A rare cosmic region that appears to be a midsize black hole has caught the eye of astronomers from 6,000 light-years away.  Eduardo Vitral, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, along with his team, spotted a miniscule region containing the mass of 800 suns and causing disruption among stars located nearby. 

The observations of the team have pointed to one thing- the potential existence of a rare intermediate-mass black hole that is located near the Scorpius constellation. "It's too tiny for us to be able to explain other than it being a single black hole. Alternatively, there might be a stellar mechanism we simply don't know about, at least within current physics," said Vitral, who is also the lead author of a study centred around the recent finding. 

So far, most of the black holes discovered by astronomers come in two sizes, either as small as 10 to 100 times the sun's mass, or the ginormous ones that are millions, if not billions times heavier than the sun. Locating a medium-sized black hole has been a rare occurence, therefore, perplexing scientists. 

How astronomers made the discovery

However, Vitral's team believes that it has been able to find the "gravitational pothole," thanks to a comprehensive analysis of more than a decade worth of Hubble Space Telescope data on the Messier 4 (or M4) star cluster, according to Space.com. The black hole, like all others, is not directly visible.

To view it, the team used data from the European Space Agency's star-mapping Gaia spacecraft to observe the motion of stars at M4's center, which appeared "like bees swarming around a hive". "If the object isn't a single intermediate-mass black hole, it would require an estimated 40 smaller black holes crammed into a space only one-tenth of a light-year across to produce the observed stellar motions. The consequences are that they would merge and/or be ejected in a game of interstellar pinball," Vitral's team said in a statement.