Neutron stars are the extremely dense remnants of an exploded star.

This raised hopes that an IMBH was the culprit, but first another possible source of the X-ray flare had to be ruled out: a neutron star in our own Milky Way galaxy, cooling off after being heated to a very high temperature. Surprisingly, the X-ray source, named 3XMM J215022.4-055108, was not located in the center of a galaxy, where massive black holes normally reside. Studying these unusual black holes could tell us about how such objects grow and evolve within both star clusters and galaxies. This is an animation of a rare and exotic intermediate-mass black hole at the center of a star cluster, similar to the one thought to be at the center of globular cluster Messier 15. Scientists attributed it to a star being torn apart after coming too close to a gravitationally powerful compact object, like a black hole. In 2006 these high-energy satellites detected a powerful flare of X-rays, but it wasn’t clear if they originated from inside or outside of our galaxy. “This helps us to understand the type of star that was disrupted by the black hole.” “Adding further X-ray observations allowed us to understand the total energy output,” said team member Natalie Webb of the Université de Toulouse in France. Lin and his team used Hubble to follow up on leads from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton), which carries three high-throughput X-ray telescopes and an optical monitor to make long uninterrupted exposures providing highly sensitive observations. Hubble discovers Black Holes in unexpected places. That is what Hubble has allowed us to do for our candidate,” said Dacheng Lin of the University of New Hampshire, principal investigator of the study. “Intermediate-mass black holes are very elusive objects, and so it is critical to carefully consider and rule out alternative explanations for each candidate. This new black hole is over 50,000 times the mass of our Sun. They are larger than stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive stars but smaller than the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies.

There have been a few other IMBH candidates found to date. Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are a long-sought “missing link” in black hole evolution. Hubble confirms that this “intermediate-mass” black hole dwells inside a dense star cluster. New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided the strongest evidence yet for mid-sized black holes in the Universe. This thin, rotating disc of material consists of the leftovers of a star that was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. This artist’s impression depicts a star being torn apart by an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH), surrounded by an accretion disc.

Are black people the missing link