The illustration above shows the space assassination in action. The strange star is destroyed by the intense gravitational pull of the black hole, which contains tens of thousands of solar masses. Stellar remnants form an accretion disk around the black hole.
Flashes of X-ray light from a superheated disk of gas alerted astronomers to the location of the black hole; otherwise he was hiding unknown in the dark. The elusive object is classified as an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH), as it is much less massive than the 'monster' black holes that live in the centers of galaxies. So IMBHs mostly don't show such results as they don't suck up as much material and are hard to find. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the IMBH is inside a dense star cluster. The K cluster itself may be the truncated core of a dwarf galaxy.
Astronomers have found the best evidence for a so-called 'cosmic murder': a black hole of an elusive class known as 'intermediate mass' literally ripped apart a star that passed too close.
With a mass of about 50,000 solar masses, the black hole is significantly smaller than the supermassive black holes found in the cores of large galaxies, much larger ones that have black holes in their stellar mass.
Medium-mass black holes (IMBHs) represent an unknown link in the evolutionary history of black holes. Despite the fact that scientists have already found several other alleged IMBHs, this find is the most compelling evidence for the existence of medium-sized black holes in the universe to date.
Surprisingly, the X-ray source designated 3XMM J215022.4? 055108, was not located in the center of the galaxy, where massive black holes are usually found. This indicates that it was IMBH who was the culprit in this situation.
The Hubble Space Telescope tracked to an X-ray source. Thanks to this, it was possible to track the exact location of the object. The revolutionary high-quality image provided significant evidence that the X-rays are not coming from an isolated source in our Galaxy, but from a distant dense star cluster on the outskirts of another galaxy – exactly where astronomers expect to find IMBH.
