Discover How Runaway Stars Unveil a Hidden Black Hole in Our Closest Galactic Neighbor!

Astronomers have made an exciting discovery: they’ve found strong evidence of a supermassive black hole near us, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

To reach this conclusion, scientists analyzed the paths of 21 stars on the fringes of the Milky Way. These stars are traveling so quickly that they will eventually escape our galaxy’s gravity. Astronomers call these “hypervelocity” stars.

Using sophisticated techniques similar to how detectives analyze bullet trajectories, researchers traced half of these stars back to the Milky Way’s central black hole. The other half, however, came from the newly identified black hole in the LMC.

“It’s astonishing to think there’s another supermassive black hole so close by,” said Jesse Han from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This one has been hiding in plain sight.”

The data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which has observed over a billion stars with incredible accuracy, was key to this discovery. By combining this information with new studies on the LMC’s orbit, researchers could pinpoint the origins of these hypervelocity stars.

Hypervelocity stars form when a binary star system gets too close to a supermassive black hole. The black hole’s massive gravitational pull tears the binary system apart. One star gets drawn into orbit around the black hole, while the other is flung away at speeds that can reach millions of miles per hour.

The researchers predicted that the LMC’s movement around the Milky Way would cause some of these stars to cluster in a particular area of our galaxy. They verified this hypothesis with their findings.

Interestingly, the characteristics of these hypervelocity stars don’t match up with other known ways stars can be ejected, such as through supernova explosions. The only logical explanation is that a massive black hole exists nearby.

The mass of this LMC black hole is estimated to be around 600,000 times that of the sun, while our Milky Way’s black hole weighs about 4 million solar masses. Some black holes elsewhere in the universe are even more massive, reaching billions of solar masses.

This groundbreaking research will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal. A preliminary version is available on the arXiv.