20,000 Black Holes in the Center of the Galaxy |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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According to a team led by Michael P. Muno of the University of California, Los Angeles, as many as 20,000 stellar-mass black holes may exist within a 6-light-year-wide sphere surrounding the 3.7-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way. A stellar-mass black hole contains about 5 to 20 solar masses. These black holes have revealed themselves as parts of closely separated binary systems. Infalling matter from the companion star piles up in a hot accretion disk, which produces outbursts of X-rays. Over the past five years, Munro's team found seven of these outbursts within 75 light-years of the center of the galaxy. Four of these were found within three light-years of the center. This suggests that there are tens of thousands of black holes in that small region of space. These black holes eventually will be swallowed by the supermassive black hole at the center.
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