Black hole 8,000 times the size of the sun discovered by Hubble Telescope

While the James Webb Telescope may be peering into the night sky and collecting new data for astronomers, its older brother, the Hubble Space Telescope, isn’t done making discoveries just yet.

According to a new report published in the journal Nature , astronomers have discovered evidence of a black hole about 8,000 times more massive than our sun and often elusive.

Astronomers share that the size of the black hole makes it so peculiar as it is far more massive than the typical black hole created from the collapse of a dead star.

However, the study also says that it isn’t as big as the kind of supermassive black hole that lurks in the center of galaxies and can hold on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of suns.

Like Goldilocks and the three bears, this black hole happens to be just right as scientists have long sought to research a medium-sized black hole, which they think can reveal more about how they form and why some become so large.

Until now, astronomers have fallen short in discovering the perfect-sized black hole, or those that are between 100 to 100,000 times the mass of the sun.

Maximilian Häberle , an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany, was behind the team that found the black hole, which they sought to do by examining a large star cluster known as Omega Centauri that is about 17,000 light years away.

“So people have wondered, is it difficult to find them because they are just not there, or because it’s difficult to detect them?” Häberle shared with NPR .

Being that they can’t be observed directly, black holes are found looking at the gravity affecting nearby objects, including stars, since they pull everything into them, including light.

Because of this, researchers had a hunch, and since the stars in this particular cluster were being observed by Hubble, as it is every year for a new photo, they looked deeper.

With more than two decades of high-quality observations taken of the cluster, researchers were able to precisely measure the motion of 1.4 million stars in the cluster, including seven in the center that are moving faster than the rest.

While the speed of the stars could see them shoot out of the cluster and be gone forever, Häberle says that their remaining “means that there must be something that is pulling on them gravitationally such that they don’t escape. And the only object that can be so massive is an intermediate-mass black hole with a minimum mass of at least 8,000 solar masses.”

In 2008, researchers proposed that there was an intermediate-sized black hole in the cluster, though it was disputed. But now, Häberle says their “evidence is very robust” and backs up their findings.

Now, future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope are being planned in order to look for other signs of a black hole that will further confirm the group’s findings.