91制片厂

A team of space scientists led by 91制片厂 Space Science Center research assistant professor Dacheng Lin discovered an elusive intermediate mass black hole when the researchers spied it (thanks to a trio of orbiting X ray telescopes) chowing down on a star that wandered into its gravitational eld. In June, Lin and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Astronomy that provides the strongest evidence to date that these middle-of-the-road black holes do exist.

鈥淲e feel very lucky to have spotted this object with a significant amount of high-quality data, which helps us pinpoint the mass of the black hole and understand the nature of this spectacular event,鈥� Lin says.

The researchers worked hard to find mid-sized black holes because confirmation of their existence is important in astrophysics; this discovery implies there are many more. 鈥淏ut there are very, very few that we know of,鈥� Lin says, 鈥渂ecause they are normally unbelievably quiet and very hard to detect, and energy bursts from encountering stars being shredded happen so rarely.鈥�