- News

An international team of scientists using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to study the most extreme ultra-luminous X-ray source, HLX-1, have found data to support the theory that this source may in fact be an intermediate-size mass black hole – something astrophysicists suspected to exist, but have failed to fully detect in the past.

The lead author Klaas Wiersema of the University of Leicester's department of Physics and Astronomy, said that the VLT was able to measure the precise distance to HLX-1 and the data from the telescope allowed the scientists to separate the light of the big, bright galaxy from that of the faint optical source.

"Much to our delight we saw in the resulting measurements exactly what we were hoping for: the characteristic light of hydrogen atoms was detected allowing us to accurately measure the distance to this object. This provided conclusive proof that the black hole was indeed located inside the big, bright galaxy, and that HLX-1 is the brightest ultra-luminous X-ray source known."

"Understanding how super-massive black holes form and grow is thus crucial to our comprehension of the formation and evolution of galaxies, which in turn goes part of the way to answering one of the really big questions: how did our own galaxy form and evolve?" said astronomer Sean Farrell, also of the University of Leicester.

Read the full article on the BBC News website.

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