Center of Milky Way is teeming with black holes
WASHINGTON — The center of our galaxy is teeming with black holes, sort of like a Times Square for strange super gravity objects, astronomers discovered.
For decades, scientists theorized that circling in the center of galaxies, including ours, were lots of stellar black holes , collapsed giant stars where the gravity is so strong even light doesn’t get out. But they hadn’t seen evidence of them in the Milky Way core until now.
Astronomers poring over old x-ray observations have found signs of a dozen black holes in the inner circle of the Milky Way. And since most black holes can’t even be spotted that way, they calculate that there are likely thousands of them there. They estimate it could be about 10,000, maybe more, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature .
“There’s lots of action going on there,” said study lead author Chuck Hailey, a Columbia University astrophysicist. “The galactic center is a strange place. That’s why people like to study it.”
The stellar black holes are in addition to — and essentially circling — the already known supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A , that’s parked at the center of the Milky Way.
In the rest of the massive Milky Way, scientists have only spotted about five dozen black holes so far, Hailey said.
The newly discovered black holes are within about 19.2 trillion miles (30.9 trillion kilometers) of the supermassive black hole at the center. So there’s still a lot of empty space and gas amid all those black holes. But if you took the equivalent space around Earth there would be zero black holes, not thousands, Hailey said.
Earth is in spiral arm around 3,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy. (A light year is 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.)
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who wasn’t part of the study, praised the finding as exciting but confirming what scientists had long expected.