Astronomers have a plan for using ripples in space-time to hunt for elusive intermediate-mass black holes around the Milky Way's center.
The most elusive black holes in the universe aren't the big ones, or the small ones. They're the medium ones — and a team of astronomers has proposed a new method, using ripples in space-time, to hunt for them.
Astronomers theorize that there might be some black holes caught in between these two extremes, known as intermediate-mass black holes , with masses a few thousand times that of the sun. But there's one catch: Despite searching for them for decades, we haven't found any yet. And so a team of astronomers, writing on the preprint server arXiv.
However, other models of black hole formation suggest that IMBHs might actually be common and just difficult to detect. The cramped conditions of the galactic core, for example, might be ripe to produce potentially thousands of large-but-not-supermassive black holes. But those IMBHs might be hidden, as the supermassive black hole in the very center of the galaxy would dominate our observations.
Related stories— James Webb Telescope spots galaxies from the dawn of time that are so massive they 'shouldn't exist'—What's the biggest black hole in the universe?
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