The Black Hole Party

The very idea of black hole is baffling and scary at the same time. Many scientists have dedicated their lives for studying these scary things. Why scary? C’mon let’s be honest.  Getting sucked by a black hole due to its strong gravitational field means instant death. Although we still don’t know what exactly will happen if a human being falls in the black hole, we have drawn our conclusions based on what it does to light.

That’s why; it may sound even scarier when we learned that scientists have discovered a dozen of black holes teaming up at the center of our galaxy-Milky way.  Data from NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory has allowed researchers to detect a group of black holes surrounding Sagittarius A*.

Sagittarius A* is a super massive black hole at the center of Milky Way-that’s where we are. For a while now, scientists have believed that there is something at this place and now it’s confirmed! Based on the findings,  up to 10,000 black holes dwell within about 3 light years of Sagittarius A*. “That’s a crowd!”  Columbia University astrophysicist Chuck Hailey, lead author of the study published in the journal nature said on Thursday, April 5^th 2018.

Sagittarius A*, boasting 4 million times the mass of our sun, is located 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Black holes in isolation are hard to detect but X-ray signatures of stellar binaries helped in their detection. These newly detected black holes, all produced by the collapse of massive dying stars, are rare ones that captured and bound themselves to a passing star, forming what is called a stellar binary.

“Black holes can form farther out from the center of the galaxy. They gravitationally interact with stars, cosmic collisions so to speak, and lose energy,” Hailey said.

“As they lose energy, they sink to the center of the galaxy, the same way heavy sediment sinks faster than light sediment in water. They get captured by the gravity of the super-massive black hole, catch a star, and voila, you have something we can see X-rays from.”

Super-massive black holes arise relatively soon after their galaxies are formed; devouring enormous amounts of gas, dust and stars to achieve colossal size. Hailey said, “As one black hole grows to such huge size, even if it was not originally in the exact center, it will sink into the center of the galaxy.”

Sure enough these findings confirm major theory and the implications are many. It is a great leap in the field of gravitational wave research and it’ll will help us to understand the behavior of black hole in the center of a typical galaxy and it’s gravitational events.