Center Of The Milky Way Has Thousands Of Black Holes, Study Shows

April 4, 20181:26 PM ET



An artist's rendering shows the Milky Way where a supermassive black hole lies at the center. A dozen smaller black holes have now been detected, and a new study suggests the monster is surrounded by about 10,000.
Spitzer Space Telescope/NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy appears to have a lot of company, according to a new study that suggests the monster is surrounded by about 10,000 other black holes.

For decades, scientists have thought that black holes should sink to the center of galaxies and accumulate there, says Chuck Hailey, an astrophysicist at Columbia University. But scientists had no proof that these exotic objects had actually gathered together in the center of the Milky Way.

"This is just kind of astonishing that you could have a prediction for such a large number of objects and not find any evidence for them," Hailey says.

He and his colleagues recently went hunting for black holes, using observations of the galactic center made by a NASA telescope called the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

More:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/04/599437677/new-study-shows-the-center-of-the-milky-way-has-thousands-of-black-holes?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=space