Today I read an interesting story from space.com about medium sized black holes. Previously, the only known variations were supermassive black holes and stellar black holes. Supermassive black holes are the giants you see in the center of galaxies, our own Milky Way no exclusion, and are millions and millions of times more massive than the sun, while stellar black holes are smaller variations, around 10 to 100 times more massive than our sun. However, these were two very intense extremes, so scientists have predicted for awhile that there must be a middle variation that patches the hole between the two. Evidence supporting those predictions came in 2019, when LIGO (a super advanced machine that can measure gravitational waves via changes in ultraprecise measurements of a laser position) and Virgo detected a new kind of black hole. It wasn't supermassive, but it was also much larger than stellar black holes. It was predicted that this black hole had originated from two stellar black holes merging, however a new study has suggested that it also could have come from the collision of two stars. The reason no one had ever thought of this, however, was because no one had ever tried simulating the collision of such massive stars. The study was led by Michela Mapelli of the University of Padova in Italy and achieved the result by simulating a collision between a young hydrogen burning star and a red giant. The existence of and further study into the origins of, as I like to call, "goldilocks" black holes could be the key to understanding the existence of supermassive black holes, which have continued to stump scientists with the source of their size. Some scientists believe that medium black holes came into existence right after the Big Bang. Perhaps those first black holes have become the supermassive black holes we see today, but for now it's still a mystery, the story behind their existence waiting in plain text at the bottom of the porridge bowl.
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AuthorAmelia Martinez is the creator of this website. In this blog she recounts activities from her time working with Agnes Chavez as a STEMArts Apprentice. Archives
October 2022
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