Two astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have proposed a way to observe what might be the second closest supermassive black hole to Earth, a giant 3 million times the mass of the Sun, hosted by the dwarf galaxy Leo I.
According to the “Space” website, the supermassive black hole, called Leo I *, was first proposed by an independent team of astronomers in late 2021, as the team noticed that the stars pick up their speed as they approach the center of the galaxy, which is evidence of the existence of black hole, but no direct imaging of an emission from a black hole has been made.
Astrophysicists Fabio Bacucci and Avi Loeb propose a new way to verify the existence of the supermassive black hole. Their work is described in a study published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Black holes are very elusive things, and sometimes they enjoy playing hide-and-seek with us,” says Fabio Pacucci, the study’s principal investigator. “No rays of light can escape their event horizon, but the environment around them can be very Brightness, if enough material falls into its gravitational well…but if mass isn’t being swallowed by the black hole, it instead emits no light and becomes impossible to find with our telescopes.”
“In our study, we suggested that a small amount of mass lost from stars orbiting a black hole might provide the accretion rate needed to monitor this,” Bacucci explains. “Old stars become very large and red, and we call them red giant stars, and red giants usually Strong winds carry only a fraction of their mass into the environment, and the space around Leo I* appears to contain enough of these ancient stars to make it observable.”
“It might be groundbreaking to observe this cluster, which might be the second closest supermassive black hole following the one at the center of our galaxy,” says Avi Loeb, co-author of the study.
