The Hubble Space Telescope's evidence of an "intermediate-sized" black hole about 6000 light-years away in the closest globular star cluster to our home planet.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Paul Morris: Lead Producer.
Music Credit:
Tesseract by Cody Johnson [ASCAP] and Gina Kouyoumdjian [BMI] via Emperia Alpha Publishing [ASCAP], Emperia Beta Publishing [BMI], and Universal Production Music
Animation Credit:
Black Hole accreting material animation by Aurore Simmonet.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Paul Morris: Lead Producer.
Music Credit:
Tesseract by Cody Johnson [ASCAP] and Gina Kouyoumdjian [BMI] via Emperia Alpha Publishing [ASCAP], Emperia Beta Publishing [BMI], and Universal Production Music
Animation Credit:
Black Hole accreting material animation by Aurore Simmonet.
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TechTranscript
00:00 It's estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes created from exploded stars,
00:07 while the universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes
00:12 weighing millions or billions of times our Sun's mass and found in the centers of galaxies.
00:18 A long-sought missing link between the two is an intermediate-mass black hole,
00:23 weighing in at hundreds to thousands of solar masses.
00:27 Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have possibly detected one of these elusive intermediate-mass black holes
00:36 in the core of the globular star cluster Messier 4, located 6,000 light-years away from Earth.
00:42 They calculated the suspected black hole's mass by studying the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field
00:50 using 12.5 years' worth of Messier 4 observations from Hubble.
00:55 The researchers estimate that the black hole could be as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun.
01:02 Thanks to Hubble's high-precision observations over a long period of time,
01:07 scientists can search the skies to help us uncover the mysteries of this missing link
01:12 and better understand our place in the universe.
01:16 [music]
01:28 [music fades]