Stellar-mass black holes - which is the proper name for what I’ve been calling “low-mass” - form when a star much bigger than the Sun explodes and its core collapses. Low-mass black holes “sing” in harmony with themselves, though with flashes of light instead of sound. Another musical metaphor: if we interpret the frequencies as notes instead of rhythms, the ratio of 3 to 2 is known as a “ perfect fifth” in harmony, the foundation of any number of chords. Music aficionados recognize this rhythm as a triplet or “ hemiola”: the playing of two different musical patterns simultaneously. If they’re right, the frequency of flares means the black hole has a mass between 300 and 500 times that of the Sun, squarely in the range for intermediate-mass black holes.įor low-mass black holes, the pattern is the juxtaposition of two evenly-timed bursts of light with three flares in the same time interval. A trio of astronomers think they’ve identified that same pattern for a black hole in the “Cigar Galaxy”, more formally known as M82. While most big galaxies harbor at least one supermassive black hole, and low-mass black holes like Cygnus X-1 are numerous (if harder to detect from a distance), but we only know about a few black holes in between.īut what if there was a trick to identifying them? Light emitted from matter close to a low-mass black hole flares in a predictable pattern that depends on the black hole’s mass. But the middle ground - medium-sized black holes - is a little trickier. The cosmos is riddled with black holes, both big and small.
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