A groundbreaking discovery reveals Palomar 5, a star cluster 80,000 light-years away, houses an astonishing 100+ stellar-mass black holes.
The revelation sheds light on the formation of tidal streams – long rivers of stars stretching across the sky, which were previously mysterious to astronomers.
N-body simulations indicate that black holes within Palomar 5 played a pivotal role in shaping the cluster’s configuration.
The study suggests that as Palomar 5 dissolves in around a billion years, it will transform into a cluster entirely composed of black holes orbiting the Milky Way’s center.
This finding has broader implications, indicating that other globular clusters may follow a similar fate and making them potential hotspots for studying black hole mergers.
In the heart of the Milky Way’s Palomar 5 cluster, a remarkable discovery has been made – a hidden swarm of more than 100 stellar-mass black holes. This enigmatic cluster, located 80,000 light-years away, provides vital insights into the formation of tidal streams, which are essentially long rivers of stars stretched across the cosmos. Previously, these streams were shrouded in mystery, but with the precision mapping of the Milky Way by the Gaia space observatory, more of them have come to light.
The unique aspect of Palomar 5 is its combination of a loose distribution of stars and an extensive tidal stream spanning over 20 degrees of the sky. This peculiarity prompted astrophysicist Mark Gieles and his team to conduct a detailed study. They employed sophisticated N-body simulations to recreate the movements and transformations of each star in the cluster.
Their simulations incorporated black holes due to recent evidence hinting at their presence in globular clusters’ central regions. The results were astonishing: a population of stellar-mass black holes within Palomar 5 could account for the cluster’s current configuration. These black holes, through gravitational interactions, slingshot stars out of the cluster and into the tidal stream, thereby altering the proportion of black holes significantly.
Gieles notes, “The number of black holes is roughly three times larger than expected from the number of stars in the cluster, and it means that more than 20 percent of the total cluster mass is made up of black holes.”
Remarkably, in about a billion years, the entire Palomar 5 cluster will dissolve, leaving only black holes orbiting the Milky Way’s center. This suggests that Palomar 5’s fate is not unique, as other globular clusters are likely to share a similar destiny. Furthermore, this discovery reinforces the idea that globular clusters are promising locations for studying black hole mergers, including the elusive middleweight black holes, bridging the gap between stellar mass and supermassive black holes. As astrophysicist Fabio Antonini of Cardiff University explains, “Our method gives us a way to learn how many black holes there are in a star cluster by looking at the stars they eject.” This groundbreaking research has been published in Nature Astronomy.
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