Study Finds New Celestial Objects

Researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found mathematical evidence that suggests that wandering black holes may be present at the periphery of our galaxy.

The study will give scientists clues to the early history of the galaxy and will also increase the understanding of galactic evolution.

“It helps with figuring out how our galaxy was assembled,” said Abraham Loeb, a professor of astronomy. “It will tell us whether early galaxies had black holes at their center.”

According to Loeb and graduate student Ryan M. O’Leary, the Milky Way Galaxy may have hundreds of black holes present in its outer regions, which were created when early galaxies combined to create the Milky Way. The merge formed a massive black hole in the center and hundreds of smaller wandering black holes on the periphery of the galaxy.

“We now know that every galaxy has a black hole at its center and that galaxies merge,” Loeb said. “The Milky Way galaxy was made out of building blocks of dwarf galaxies, which came together.”

General relativity calculations give evidence for the existence of the black holes—if visual evidence is found within astronomical observations, the black holes would “test the predictions of general relativity,” O’Leary said.

The cluster is expected to be highly compact and the “black hole will give the stars higher speeds.”

O’Leary has started the search for these compact clusters using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Database—a program that maps the Northern Hemisphere’s sky.

The objects should have already been detected in the database, but since no one has been looking for them, they haven’t been identified and studied, he said.

O’Leary is currently sifting through the data and hopes that he will identify potential star clusters harboring a rogue black hole.

Though these black holes may be roaming our galaxy, the security of the Earth is not in question, according to Loeb. The chances that a black hole is located close to our solar system are “very small,” he added.

But if one were to pass too close to our solar system, it would likely “disturb the movement of the inner planets,” including Earth, according to Loeb.

But for now, no one should lose sleep over these rogue black holes lurking among the peripheral stars of our galaxy.