This Star Might Have Been Thrown Out of a Globular Cluster by an Intermediate Mass Black Hole

This Star Might Have Been Thrown Out of a Globular Cluster by an Intermediate Mass Black Hole

Astronomers are on the hunt for those in-between black holes, not the small stellar ones or the supermassive ones, but something right in the middle. Recently, a group of scientists spotted a star travelling at high velocity out of the globular cluster M15. This speedy star got kicked out about 20 million years ago and is now zooming along at an incredible 550 km/s, fast enough that it's actually escaping our entire Galaxy! The researchers think…

Black holes are available in a range of sizes. Black holes of stellar mass are formed from the collapse of massive stars, usually weighing between 5 and 100 times the mass of our sun, and are dispersed in galaxies. At the other extreme are the supermassive black holes that hide [...]