By perusing two decades' worth of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope archives, astrophysicists have found evidence of a nearby black hole at least 8,200 times as massive as the Sun, potentially the second-largest in our Galaxy. If verified, this could be a significant discovery of an intermediate-mass black hole, bridging supermassive and smaller black holes.
Astrophysicist Maximilian Haberle and team examined over 500 images of Centauri, a star cluster 18,000 light years away, finding seven fast-moving stars near the center that suggested a massive unseen object, possibly a black hole between 8,200-50,000 solar masses.
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