Hubble Hunts for Intermediate Sized Black Hole Close to Home

Astronomers, using NASAs Hubble Space Telescope have come up with what they say is some of their best evidence yet for the presence of a rare class of intermediatesized black hole that may be lurking in the heart of the closest globular star cluster to Earth, located 6, 000 lightyears away. Like intense gravitational potholes in the fabric of space, virtually all black holes seem to come in two sizes: small and humongous. Its estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes (several times the mass of our Sun) created from exploded stars. The universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes, weighing millions or billions of times our Suns mass and found in the centers of galaxies. A longsought missing link is an intermediatemass black hole, weighing in somewhere between 199 and 10, 000 solar masses. How would they form, where would they hang out, and why do they seem to be so rare For more information, visit Credit: