A team of astronomers was baffled to find a cloud of hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide near the center of the Milky Way mysteriously disappearing behind what appeared to be a colossal event horizon. In response, the Alma Telescope in Chile was used to observe the gas cloud. It revealed that the elliptical cloud was being pulled around by immense gravitational forces while entire sections were being 'swallowed' up.
Computer models have since concluded the most likely cause to be a black hole measuring some 1.4 trillion kilometers in diameter, which makes it the second largest black hole in the Milky Way. The only larger black hole is Sagittarius A, around which the rest of the Milky Way orbits and which therefore in effect anchors the rest of our galaxy.
This find is of great significance as it is an example of an intermediate-mass black hole, which remain highly sought after to fill a gap in astronomers' knowledge about the most massive objects in the universe. Small black holes are well understood, with the Milky Way being home to an estimated 100 million of these (though only 60 have been spotted). Likewise, large black holes are typically found at the center of galaxies, and thus also easy to observe. The process of the formation of the super-massive black holes is still a hotly debated topic, with no definitive evidence on any theory having been found.
Can you guess why super-massive black hole formation is not yet understood?
The primary problem faced by astronomers all over the world in making discoveries such as this one, is their inability to analyse the data gathered by their astronomical arrays. The compute power required to process every signal is immense, and therefore they need our help. You can get involved by installing the software package BOINC, and joining the project Einstein@Home. This donates the idle time of your computer to help astronomers understand the universe, alongside 500,000 other established volunteers.
I would like to close this article with the worlds of the top contributor to Einstein@Home:
It is important that we support those who have a chance of making the discoveries that just might really allow us to understand this enigmatic universe we find ourselves in. It is too depressing a thought to imagine we are marooned on this speck of dust we call home without a practical means of ever realistically being able to escape from our solar system. We should be able to colonise other planets or moons but to even just visit a nearby star system seems impossible, let alone the rest of the galaxy. So I've chosen to support projects which might increase our knowledge and understanding of the universe. The hope is that some of these endeavours may help to discover new physics and with that, new possibilities for eventually exploring the cosmos.
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